Amateur college athletics. That’s what we tell ourselves when we turn on the television Saturdays in the fall and watch good ‘ole State U take the field. But the reality is that even though the student-athletes performing wonders in front of us are labeled amateurs, college football itself is a big-money industry. Some of it is for profit, but a lot of the revenue taken in is used to fund a whole host of other athletic programs.
There’s already been lost money due to the other revenue sport (college basketball) getting its big-money NCAA Tournament canceled, but that’s nothing compared to what could be coming if college football befalls the same fate because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to an article by USA TODAY, big-time colleges and universities stand to lose a whopping $4.1 Billion total in fiscal year revenue if the season isn’t played this year. And that’s just the 50-plus public universities in the Power 5 conferences, it doesn’t account for private schools or smaller programs that sill rely on football to keep things afloat.
That’s an average of $78 Million per school. It’s even more for a place like Ohio State that’s an annual top five to ten program in football revenue. Based on amounts reported for annual revenue in 2019, that’s more than 60% of these schools’ combined total operating revenue.
That’s a big hit, and no wonder why there are so many people pacing back and forth on what’s going to happen this fall. A lot of these schools barely make a profit with the cash flowing in from television contracts, advertising money, and gate revenue a season produces. Without it, there’s going to be a lot of balance sheets significantly in the red — even with significant cost-cutting measures.
ESPN analyst Chris Fowler believes college football season in spring of 2021 gaining momentum https://t.co/f94O7Nemn6
— Buckeyes Wire (@BuckeyesWire) April 16, 2020
It’s clear athletic directors, presidents, coaches, players, and fans are beginning to fret.
“This is way beyond anybody’s imagination,” Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione said during a teleconference last week. “I was telling somebody the other day that I feel like we are living one of those movies. … We’re enthralled by the storyline, the cinematography, the drama and whatever emotions get invoked. Then the movie would end and you would get up and walk out of the theater and realize it was quite a story but it was just a movie. This one, we are living day to day and we still don’t know exactly if we are a fourth of the way through it, halfway through it, three-fourths of the way through it.”
Since the novel coronavirus has turned life upside down, it’s done the same to sports. Many believed it to be a very temporary shutdown that would have things back to relative normal by the summer of fall, but with no clear exit out of this thing, and with the virus still raging, that’s no longer the case. College football and many other sports are in serious jeopardy.
With so much money at stake though, you can bet there’s a lot of smart people trying as hard as they can to put together a plan to get some sort of college football season up and going. I used to be on the side that thought being conservative with the health of everyone would have a good shot of continuing to cancel things, but no more.
And there are more than a few that know the business model that agree.
All of this is “why they’re going to try their damnedest to have a season of 12 games, regardless of what months” in which it occurs, said Dan Rascher, a University of San Francisco sport management professor who has been an expert witness on the economics of major-college athletics for plaintiffs in antitrust cases against the NCAA. “The question is whether they will get the same revenues for the games.”
It’s still possible that we lose this college football season, but with the amount of money on the line, and the dire straights a lot of universities would be in without it, I now believe there will be something happening with college football this season. I don’t know what season, or how many games, but without this revenue, college sports and campus life is going to experience a financial earthquake that’s going to be extremely hard to recover from.