There has been a lot of wondering and debate about the proper way to do college football (and all college sports) this year. When and how are the biggest questions. We’ve seen conferences announce conference-only schedules; we’ve seen some smaller conferences move fall sports to the spring already. We’ve even seen some cancel fall sports altogether.
We won’t see major college football canceled this year, and there is a very simple reason why.
No one can afford it.
When I say that “no one” can afford it, I mean no one. Not the biggest schools with the massive athletic budgets, and not the smaller Group of Five budgets. For example, Bowling Green was due to be paid $2.2 million for its two Big Ten nonconference games. Without those games, there’s a chance the school gets nothing.
Now, $2.2 million might seem like a lot to anyone, but it wouldn’t break the bank for a Big Ten school. For Bowling Green, though, it’s almost ten percent of the entire athletic department budget. The school had already discontinued its baseball program to help slash $2 million from the budget, and that was before these football games were canceled.
For a big school, the percentages were even higher. Ohio State made approximately $210 million from athletics in the 2019-2020 year, and about half of that total came from ticket sales and media rights. While the per-sport breakdown isn’t given anywhere, the school noted that 2018 saw $10 million more in tickets sales, mostly due to the 2018 home game against Oklahoma. That’s right, one football game can make up close to a $10 million difference.
The loss of an entire football season would mean tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue for a school like Ohio State. I can only make a ballpark estimate, but setting $50 million as a low-end estimate seems conservative. We’re already seen Power Five schools cancel sports–most notably, Stanford will discontinue 11 programs at the end of this coming academic year. That was, again, without the fallout of a lost football season.
I saw people on Twitter wondering, since we may see some spread and cases through March, whether the next March Madness we’ll see will be in 2022. Things and money aren’t stagnant, though. If we don’t see March Madness in 2021, we won’t see March Madness again.
The 2019 edition of March Madness earned the NCAA almost $1 billion. That money goes entirely towards supporting athletes and schools for all of the non-revenue NCAA Championships, as well as the lower divisions. The NCAA had some money saved up for an eventuality like this, but it can’t do this two years in a row. If we don’t see March Madness this coming year, we won’t see organized college athletics in the same recognizable form ever again.
The same is true for football, possibly even more so. A billion dollars per year is enough to help cover the non-revenue sports, and the Division II and Division III championships. They’re not super-expensive, and the NCAA keeps events as regional as possible to save money. A lost FBS football season, though, would total at least four or five times that–and not spread out among thousands of colleges, but mostly absorbed by the biggest 100 or so schools. That type of revenue loss would mean numerous discontinued sports at each school, as well as a need to restructure football programs. Losing tens of millions of dollars in revenue doesn’t make most of the expenses go away.
In short, major college football is “too big to fail.” The schools cannot afford to miss a season.
Now, that doesn’t mean we’ll see football in the fall. And maybe there are a few schools that will look at their athletic budgets and think they can handle not playing for a year. But for most, a year without football will completely derail athletic departments.
Everything schools do will see revenue take a hit. Fewer fans means far less in ticket sales. Fewer games likely means less television money (though in the current sports-starved environment, perhaps negotiations can make up for that a bit). There will be pain no matter what. But nothing would compare to canceling a season.
I don’t know if we’ll definitely see football in the fall. Perhaps, if any of the promising-looking vaccines are successful, we’ll all be getting shots in early November and football can be played from January to April. Maybe we’ll see football in the spring. Or maybe, if not of that works, we’ll see schools schedule a handful of one-off exhibition games, doing whatever they can to get television viewers and maybe, depending on location, some fans in seats.
I have no idea what form it will take. But I do know that enough of these schools literally cannot afford to not play football. So they’ll play. The when, and where, and how could still change.