Without football, NCAA schools may face economic ‘Ice Age’ that impacts other sports
As sports fans eagerly await the return of games, Santa Clara County executive officer Dr. Jeffrey Smith offered a stark warning.
The Los Angeles Times reported Smith did expected there would not be “any sports games until at least Thanksgiving, and we’d be lucky to have them by Thanksgiving. This is not something that’s going to be easy to do.”
If that proved to be true, it likely would wipe out an entire Major League Baseball season, and put the NFL and college football schedules in doubt. The latter could have an ugly trickle-down effect.
Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard said without college football, other sports would be in jeopardy. Pollard told the Washington Post that Iowa State’s athletic budget is about $90 million a year. Of that, college football revenues account for roughly 75 percent of its revenue.
Without college football games, NCAA schools would face a financial “Ice Age,” Pollard said. The future of non-revenue sports would potentially be at risk.
“If football and basketball decline, you could see a number of schools scale back athletic programs all together,” Texas A&M president Michael Young told Sports Illustrated. “Schools that offer 25 sports, you’ll see some schools begin to put hiatus if not stop the sports that are expensive and not revenue-generating.”
Sports other than football and men’s basketball cost Power 5 athletic departments more than $960 million, (roughly $17 million a school) in 2018, Sports Illustrated reported. Football brought in about $28.2 million per Power Five program.
“I don’t know how any of us, how the current NCAA model, could survive if we’re not playing any football games,” Pollard told the Post.
“It’s hard today to wrap your head around how challenging that would be, if we can’t play any football games,” Pollard added. “We’d essentially be bankrupt.”
That’s why many schools are preparing a number of different plans for the college football season.
Canzano of the Oregonian shared a half-dozen potential scenarios for the 2020 college football season, including pushing it back March 2021, canceling it altogether or playing a truncated, shortened season in the fall.
Former Colorado coach Rick Neuheisel believes players would need a month to prepare for a season.
“If they can all get together on Aug. 1 and be ready to go, they’ll be fine,” Neuheisel told the Oregonian. “The kids will be close enough to shape that they can get back into shape, they’ll be fine. If you can get a little more time, a couple of weeks in July to acclimate, they’d be fine.”
The big question: when would it be safe for students to return to campus? The coronavirus pandemic continues to spread and schools across the nation have closed.
Young, the Texas A&M president, told Sports Illustrated the key could be COVID-19 testing.
“Right now the tests take some periods of time to get back,” Young said. “If we could do that quicker, you could imagine getting the whole football team together, an (academic) class together, and test you all and see you are all O.K. and then you can all gather. That is conceivable.”
A lack of tests continues to be a vexing problem for many states, so that could be a difficult solution.
It’s possible the coronavirus numbers will decline by the summer, but there is much we don’t know about the disease. And with that, the future of sports, including college football, is cloudy.
“A situation,” SEC associate commissioner for communications told the Post, “with more questions than answers right now.”
