Here's an article with a lot of good quantitative info on how a year with no football could permanently devastate college sports as we know it (lots of sports dropped, the end of $75 million coaching contracts, bloated football support staffs and the arms race on gaudy training facilities - could this be the equalizer that puts the P5 on more level turf with everyone else?) The article has
lots more than this, but here are some tidbits:
- Not playing football this year would cost athletic departments $4 billion (including $1.2 billion in ticket revenue).
- Each P5 school would lose an average of $62 million in football revenue (including $18.5 million in ticket sales). This is 75-85% of their athletic operating budgets.
- Athletic departments are SAVING money with the cancellation of spring sports.
- Athletic departments are losing money from universities not collecting, or refunding, student fees from students not being on campus (large amounts of student fees are siphoned off to subsidize athletics). The PAC-12 is the P5 conference with the highest portion of their athletic budgets funded by this source, although Virginia (13.4%), Maryland (12.4%) and Rutgers (11.8%) are the individual P5 schools with the highest % funded by student fees.
- Group of 5 conferences (i.e. AAC) are much more dependent on student fees, averaging 21.9%, with only $842,500 avg. media rights money being distributed to each school (vs. $30 million avg. for each P5 school). Navy makes more off their out-of-conference Notre Dame and Army games than their entire AAC conference distribution.
As more college athletic departments cut sports programs, the financial wreckage is becoming clear. And it gets even worse if college football doesn't return.
www.espn.com