Ohio State stands to lose mind-boggling amount of revenue if football season is completely canceled

Now that attentions have seemingly turned to the spring for an Ohio State football season, there’s a ton of money on the line.

I guess in retrospect it could have been worse. Rather than all-out canceling the 2020 football season, the Big Ten announced its intentions to postpone the season to the spring. Now, whether that is realist or not remains to be seen because the coronavirus pandemic doesn’t look to be loosening its grip much and many believe we’ll have another surge in the winter with the arrival of the flu season.

Aside from college football being a way of life for many, another big reason to try and get some sort of season is has a lot to do with the Benjamins.

It’s no secret that college football is a big-money business, especially at a place like Ohio State that is routinely in the top three revenue producers in the country. Without football being a cash cow for OSU, other programs will suffer, the budget will have to be torn up, and there are all kinds of considerations when that happens.

So how much money does Ohio State stand to lose if there is no season at all? According to a report from the New York Post, it could be as much as $104 million, by far the most in the Big Ten. Compare that to Rutgers on the other end of the spectrum that figures to lose $49 million. Included in that $104 million is also a league-high $50 million in ticket revenue that stands to take a big hit even with a season.

“It reminds me of the quip by Warren Buffett: Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked,” Rutgers economics professor Mark Killingsworth told the Post. “All of the schools are going to take a big financial beating, but some of the schools are much better equipped to weather the storm. Some have been run like a very tight ship. There are others — Rutgers is clearly the leading case — where spending has been insane.”

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The numbers are even more staggering when you look at the conference as a whole. When examining historical records based on revenue adjusted for estimated distribution of the 13 available public institutions’ data, the Big Ten stands to lose approximately $952 million.

That gives us almost a billion reasons to hope something can be played this spring. There are probably more downstream impacts that have real-world ramifications to real people that we just can’t fathom.