Is football really king?

[Artifact]

With the Ivy League it's supposed to be academics first & money second. However with their large alumni gifts & endowments, football money supposely becomes a back seat. As for their academic sport qualifications of players at times I feel they are suspect.

 

[vtcwbuff]

i went thru the financial report and couldn't find anything that broke out football vs. basketball. not saying it isn't there, but it's 60 pages long or so and i didn't see it. what i did find was something that broke down the revenues, expenses, and profitability of each program.

Football - $9.96M total revenue,$10.4M expenses, <$454,000> loss

MBasketball - $7.85M total revenue, $5.54M expenses, $2,312,000 profit

WBasketball - $5.56M total revenue, $4.08M expenses, $1,476,000 profit

so my point is, even if the info i found is from 2009 and not 2010, it's also important to look at the expenses. football is much more expensive, partly due to the sheer number of scholarship players on the football team. and the game expenses, team travel, and equipment were more than the men's and women's hoops combined by a wide margin.

i'm not disagreeing that football is king. but our football program is not as profitable compared to other big schools and our hoops programs are more profitable than most, esp. the women's hoops program.

Eric - The 2010 numbers were from a Bloomberg Report article by Chris Eichleberger. He e-mailed me the financial report submitted to the NCAA and it indicated that UConn's wcbb program was in the red. He based his conclusions on hte numbers in that report. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was fairly significant. I think he also indicated that high salaries were a large part of the red side of the ledger at UConn - and elsewhere. Something like 40% of the operating revenues comes to mind. In any case, it would not surprise me that the team would be in the black in 2009 and show a loss in 2010 as attendance continued to fall.

 

[ctchamps]

LHN is a pretty small amount of Texas's football revenues. It's a brand extension that allows it to maximize its Tier 3 revenue streams.

I understand that. The point is that Texas makes so much more than any other school, it doesn't need conference arrangements. Therefore it will most likely not give in to any demands other B12 schools may make. OU is almost in the same category of earnings. They won't want to see those earnings erode. They will be faced with the decision to stay with Texas because it helps their earnings But they will have to reconcile that doing this they are not standing up to the LHN which could impact them recruitment wise. I think in the end neither university will reconcile over this.