RED IN THE ZONE
How UConn fell into a $42M hole
When the University of Connecticut’s Board of Trustees voted last month to approve a budget that included the elimination of four sports by the end of next year, the reason seemed obvious.
COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on school budgets across the nation. A shortfall of at least $47 million — and quite probably much more — is expected for the 2020-21 academic year at UConn. Surely, cuts to the athletics budget were a necessity.
In fact, as UConn President Thomas Katsouleas and athletic director David Benedict stressed, the decision to cut men’s tennis, men’s cross country, men’s swimming and diving, and women’s rowing was the result of a comprehensive review of the athletic department that began long before the COVID-19 crisis.
“For several years,” Katsouleas said at the June 24 Board of Trustees meeting, “the level of institutional financial support has been growing.”
Yes it has.
In 2019, UConn athletics ran a $42.3 million deficit that was fully subsidized by
the university — $8.8 million through student fees and a whopping $33.5 million from direct institutional support (state funds, tuition, endowment income, etc.).
Juxtapose that against 2005, when the athletics department received just $9.5 million in subsidies — $6.05 million in student fees and a mere $3.5 million in institutional support.
The numbers have grown every year since. In 2013, UConn’s final year in the Big East, athletics took in an institutional subsidy of $9.1 million.
The following year, UConn’s first in the American Athletic Conference for nearly all sports, the institutional subsidy had doubled to $17.2 million. Three years later, it was over $30 million, and the entire subsidy has been in the $40 million range each of the past three years.
A 2017 UConn Senate Budget Committee report recommended the athletics department develop a multi-year strategy to reduce the subsidy to “2010 levels” by 2022. UConn’s direct institutional subsidy in 2010 was $5.9 million (to go with $8.6 million in student fees). While it would seem impossible to get to back down to that number over the next couple of years, Benedict’s 2020 directive from the school is to swath 25 percent from the deficit over each of the next three years.
And so, along with numerous other budget cuts (including a self-imposed, 15-percent pay cut for Benedict), four sports have been cut. Some would argue one sport that should have been cut is football, which has hemorrhaged money while failing to post a winning season since 2010 (including a 10-39 overall mark the past four years).
In 2011, UConn football had $17.9 million in operating expenses but brought in $13 million in revenue, thanks largely to money tied to its conference’s bowl affiliation along with strong ticket sales.
In 2019, UConn football had $16.6 in operating expenses against a mere $3.3 million in revenues. No sport at the school came even close to operating at such a deficit.
Football survived, however. Benedict rightly noted that the program brings ancillary benefits to the university and athletics department in the form of media rights, sponsorship deals, and other sources of income that don’t directly benefit just football.
Revenues and general enthusiasm have been down for both the men’s and women’s basketball programs in recent years, as well. Part of that was due to a lack of success on the court — the men’s team had three straight losing seasons prior to a 19-12 finish this past season. But a large part was from being a member of the AAC, a league that made little geographical sense for UConn and inspired almost no passion among its fan base.
In June, 2019 — almost exactly a year to the day before voting to cut four sports — UConn’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously to return to the Big East in all sports but football and hockey. That move became official on July 1. Ecstatic UConn fans dubbed it “Big East Day.”
While the return to the Big East — or, for that matter, the cutting of four sports — won’t immediately cure UConn’s athletics deficit, it is a positive and even a crucial step toward that goal.
The Big East, of course, doesn’t sponsor football, so UConn football will play as an independent with no conference affiliation.
It’s not quite what Lew Perkins envisioned some 30 years ago, when he dreamed of making UConn football a force in college sports.
Hitching a wagon to football
Perkins’ primary goal after taking over as UConn’s athletic director in 1990 was to turn football into a big-time program. The massive TV money, the money tied to bowl games, all stemmed from football. As great as the UConn basketball programs were becoming, if the school didn’t try to jump on the football money wagon, it could imperil its athletics future.
Perkins, who retired in 2010 after seven years as Kansas AD, was a lot of things. He had his flaws. There’s a well-documented story of Perkins spending $1,450 on 14 pitchers of orange juice at the Four Seasons Hotel during one Big East tournament in New York.
But he was right on the money about hitching a wagon to football.
“I guarantee you one thing: Lew Perkins would never have second-guessed himself about going for football,” said Hall of Fame former men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun. “He thought it was the only way, and maybe at that time it was, that we could have the edge that we wanted to have as a school.”
Hall of Fame women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma concurred.
“With the information that we had available, with the landscape in the country as it was … the feeling around the country was, ‘Listen, this thing is gonna be run by football.’ As great as the Big East is, we can see this coming down the road that college football is gonna be driving the bus. So, that prediction was right.”
Benedict was playing linebacker at Southern Utah in the mid-1990s when Perkins was steering the UConn athletics department. But he, too, agreed that Perkins did the right thing.
“There’s no way you could understand and appreciate all the factors that went into that decision, but I think Lew made the right decision,” Benedict said. “If you look around the country and the number of people that are invested in football, I don’t think there’s any question that there’s a certain platform and opportunity that you have if you’re competing at the Division I level in football than if you’re not.
“While certainly we can all acknowledge that we’ve hit a rough patch in football over the last nine years now, Lew invested in football, made a commitment to football, and built a program that took us to a BCS Fiesta Bowl. I mean, that’s tremendous. It’s unfortunate that no one remembers that, or understands or appreciates how unbelievable that was.”
UConn football transitioned from Division I-AA to Division 1-A in 2000 as an independent. Three years later it moved into 40,000-seat Rentschler Field in East Hartford, and the following season joined the Big East. That same year, the Huskies went to their first bowl game, the Motor City Bowl, where they trounced Toledo. From 2007-10, UConn went to four straight bowl games, capped by that trip to the Fiesta Bowl after winning the Big East title. In 2010, UConn football had $14.4 million in operating expenses — about $2 million less than in 2019. However, the program brought in $12.3 million in revenue in 2010, nearly four times the amount it brought in last year.
Indeed, football expenses have largely been the same over the past decade — peaking at $17.9 million in 2011 but generally staying within the $14-16 million range. For instance, last year, UConn paid its coaching staff $4.1 million — not much higher than the $3.6 million it paid its staff back in 2010. And that’s with head coach Randy Edsall on a contract paying him “only” $1 million (before bonuses) — one of the lowest salaries of any FBS coach in the nation. Other expenditures (scholarships, support staff, recruiting, etc.) have largely been in the same ballpark for the past decade.
However, the program’s revenues have plummeted, from a high of $13 million in 2011 to the $3.3 million total of 2019.
How has that happened? Onfield performance certainly hasn’t helped. In 2010, on the heels of the Fiesta Bowl trip, UConn raked in
$4.4 million in ticket sales. Head coach Randy Edsall famously departed the team in the hours following the Fiesta Bowl loss, creating a coaching carousel over the past decade that is virtually unsustainable for a program without a built-in reservoir of talent in its own backyard.
Still, thanks to its Big East affiliation and some impressive non-conference home games (including Maryland and Michigan in 2013) Rentschler Field drew good crowds. The football program raked in $5.2 million in ticket sales in both 2012 and 2014.
But that gradually decreased while the losing increased. In 2019, UConn football earned a mere $1.6 million at the gate — less than a third of what it earned five years earlier.
Losing on the field hurt in other obvious ways. In 2011, UConn football reported $6.3 million in NCAA and conference distributions, a result of the Big East’s affiliation with New Year’s bowl games and the league’s TV agreement. In the last year of the Big East in 2013, UConn football still earned $4.3 million from NCAA payouts.
Since the move to the AAC in 2014, UConn has received zero dollars in NCAA distributions. Not a single penny.
It has continued to receive conference distributions, as much as $2.5 million in 2015 after its last trip to a bowl game.
In 2019, that number was $535,000. That’s a nearly $6 million annual difference in NCAA and conference distributions since 2011.
Add the lack of TV money that would come with being in a Power Five conference and the Husky football program has turned into a money pit that some believe should be axed.
As Calhoun noted, however: “You can’t put tens of millions of dollars into something, get a stadium that’s certainly good enough for college football … and just let all of that go.”
The use of that stateowned stadium also impacts UConn’s athletic budget. The school paid $1.3 million for the use of Rentschler Field in 2019 and another $1.2 million for “game expenses,” which includes officials, security, event staff, and ambulance coverage.
So the state university is paying the state $2.5 million a year for rent and gameday staff. Yet UConn does not collect revenue from parking or concessions at Rentschler.
The football finances will improve as UConn takes steps to cut the level of institutional support. Among the measures announced by Benedict was a plan to reduce the tuition rate for athletes. The football program showed a $4.7 million expense for scholarships in 2019, but future budgets will show a lower figure for tuition.
But in truth, UConn’s recent financial straits are less about its chase for football dollars and more about its failure to grab a seat when the conference realignment musical chairs game came to a halt eight years ago.
Trouble in Paradise
In November, 2012, the UConn men’s basketball team was in paradise. Literally.
The Huskies were in St Thomas, Virgin Islands, playing in a tournament called the Paradise Jam. Back on the U.S. mainland, decisions were being made that would determine whether UConn’s athletics program would have a financially secure future — or if there was trouble in paradise.
The Atlantic Coast Conference was in the midst of deciding between Louisville
and UConn as a new member. As UConn prepared to face Wake Forest in its first Paradise Jam game on Nov. 17, program officials remained cautiously optimistic.
“We’re definitely in the mix,” then-UConn deputy athletics director Paul McCarthy told the New Haven Register.
A little over a week later, that optimism gave way to utter dismay. The ACC chose Louisville over UConn. The vote by the ACC’s school presidents wound up being unanimous, but it certainly wasn’t a mandate. Many of the basketball-centric schools, like Duke and North Carolina, initially favored UConn. On an institutional level, UConn was almost certainly a better fit for the league.
But the Huskies’ men’s basketball program had run into troubles, including recruiting violations under Calhoun and a postseason ban in 2013 resulting from consistently low Academic Progress Rate scores. Calhoun abruptly retired in September, 2012.
Louisville still had its Hall of Fame coach, Rick Pitino and would actually win a national title about four months later (though that title has since been vacated due to NCAA violations). Perhaps more importantly, its football program (9-2 at the time of the ACC vote) had experienced a bit more traditional success than UConn.
Add in its geographic advantage and Louisville officially got the ACC invite on Nov. 28, 2012.
To paraphrase Dean Keaton in ‘The Usual Suspects’: “They ruined UConn in there tonight.” It was a devastating blow. “That decision certainly, with us being left out of conference realignment and going from a BCS-level conference to what they refer to now as the ‘Group of Five,’ had a massive impact on UConn, over time,” said Benedict, who wasn’t at UConn at the time. “As it played out, that vote on ultimately giving an opportunity to join one of the so-called ‘Power Five’ has certainly impacted us on a significant scale.”
Its impact was still being felt on June 24. Had UConn received a bid to the ACC, it is doubtful the school would have had to cut any sports. While numerous schools around the country have cut sports in recent weeks, not a single program in one of the Power Five conferences — ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12 — had done so until July 8, when Stanford (Pac-12) cut a whopping 11 sports.
It isn’t hard to figure out the advantages of being in a Power Five league.
In 2019, programs in the ACC averaged $29.5 million in payouts from the conference thanks to national TV media deals stoked largely by football. That number was even greater for teams in the Big Ten ($54 million per team), SEC ($43.7 million) and a league the Huskies also flirted with in recent years, the Big 12 (between $33-36 million per team).
The Pac-12 announced earlier this month it had brought in revenues of $530 million and distributed $387 million, an average of $32.2 million per school for the 2018-19 financial year. The year-to-year increases of 7 percent and 9 percent, respectively, is primarily a result of increases in media rights and postseason bowl revenues.
Programs in the AAC received an average of about $2 million in media-rights deal payouts.
That TV money would have essentially supplanted the institutional subsidy. Would UConn athletics still be receiving money from the university? Almost certainly, according to Benedict. Many Power Five programs still do. But that number would be far lower than $42.3 million — perhaps closer to the $8.8 million the program gets through student fees.
‘We operated like we were one of those schools’
Of course, UConn football hasn’t been the only program losing money. The men’s basketball team has seen ticket sales ebb from $4.6 million in 2010 to just over $3 million in 2019. Women’s basketball’s sales at the gate, despite historic winning streaks over the past decade, have been relatively stagnant.
The move to the AAC in 2013 brought with it another monetary drain in the form of travel. Instead of bus trips to Providence, New York, and New Jersey, and short flights to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., UConn sports teams were now flying to places like Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Orlando, Tampa and Wichita for league games.
UConn men’s basketball spent $898,474 in team travel in 2013, its final year in the Big East. The following year, that number had just about doubled to $1.7 million. In 2019, the Husky hoops team racked up $1.5 million in travel expenses.
And of course that increased travel applied not only to the football and basketball teams, but to the so-called “Olympic sports” (baseball, softball, volleyball, etc.), as well. The athletics program went from $5.7 million in travel expenses overall in 2013 to $6.9 million in 2014 and was at $7.8 million in 2019.
Through it all, the subsidy kept increasing.
According to a UConn Senate budget committee report in April, 2017, expenditures for the athletics department grew 70 percent — from $47 million to $80 million — between 2005 and 2017. During the same period, despite numerous national championships in men’s and women’s basketball, revenues increased by less than 10 percent.
“We operated like we had an unlimited amount of income,” Auriemma noted. “We operated like we were one of those (Power Five) schools.”
Indeed, the hope continued that a Power Five invite would come.
“Everything pointed — to me, the presidents, the athletic directors, the board of trustees — that we were gonna get in one of those conferences, and it’s disappointing we haven’t,” said Calhoun. “We have all kinds of legitimacy, both academically and otherwise, as an institution. Certainly, athletics has been great until the past four of five years.”
In 2015, the Big 12 was talking expansion. Programs from the “Group of Five” groveled for an invite. It all turned out to be a big tease as the conference wound up taking no new teams.
Not that UConn had a chance, anyway. The University of Texas was driving that decision, and it had no particular need for UConn.
“It’s really hard to be a Power Five unless you’re somewhat of a potential power in football,” Calhoun noted. “If I’m UConn, I’m sure they’re disappointed. They seem like they’ve been left on the side of the highway. Every other criteria, they seem to meet.”
In 2016-17, the men’s team went on a tailspin of four straight losing seasons and fired coach Kevin Ollie for “just cause” with nearly $11 million left on his contract, kicking off a legal battle that still continues.
The AAC was a problem. Fans just weren’t excited about home bouts with Tulsa and Tulane, or even SMU and Houston when both teams were successful.
The AAC TV deal wasn’t paying the bills. And even when a new 12-year, $1 billion TV deal with ESPN, which would pay league programs nearly $7 million a year, was announced by AAC commissioner Mike Aresco in March, 2019, UConn wasn’t thrilled. The deal threatened the long, successful relationship between the UConn women’s program and SNY, a deal that generated about $1 million per year and drew local ratings that topped those of the Boston Red Sox. ESPN planned to stash most of its programming behind a paywall on ESPNplus.
There was really only one answer for UConn: Return to the Big East.
A return home
Since the move back to the Big East was announced a little over a year ago and became official a little more than two weeks ago, UConn fans have been nothing short of ecstatic.
“In my four years, I have not seen more excitement about the program since I’ve been here,” said Benedict. “Obviously, men’s basketball specifically, it’s not close.”
Indeed, Benedict noted that ticket sales are already trending more than 2,000 ahead of the same time last year — and that’s with sales starting some six weeks later than last year, and in the midst of a global pandemic that could mean games with no fans in the stands this winter, or no games at all.
“I just think there’s so many parts to it,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said.
“(UConn has) one of the best fan bases in college basketball, and it’s been deprived of winning for the last couple of years, combined with a talented roster with some young players that resemble the type of talent that was once littered throughout the program.
“The return to the Big East, the way the season ended in terms of the program taking a big step and learning how to win again, I just think there’s so many parts to it that come together to make it this kind of perfect storm.”
Meanwhile, SNY and Fox Sports (the Big East’s media-rights holder) have struck a multi-year deal to broadcast as many as 18 UConn women’s games per year on SNY.
The football team has already drawn up a surprisingly competitive schedule as an independent, with future “guarantee” games against the likes of Clemson, Michigan and Ohio State that will pay UConn millions of dollars. UConn also has a new deal with CBS Sports Network that could be worth about $2 million over the next four years.
“I do think that on the football side, there is some general excitement right now, from the standpoint that the schedules are interesting and exciting to people,” Benedict said. “I think people feel good about the fact that we put a national TV deal together. It would appear that recruiting seems to be going very well, at this point in time. So, from that standpoint, I think people are generally excited.”
Despite the elimination of four sports last month, and even with the prospect of a canceled or drastically reduced fall sports season due to COVID-19, things appear to be on the upswing with UConn athletics. Long before the return to the Big East was announced, the school began construction on a sparkling new baseball facility, Elliot Ballpark, that was due to open in March before the pandemic hit. It is now due to open next spring.
New soccer and softball stadiums are due to be completed soon, as well.
The value of the so-called “Olympic sports” shouldn’t be underestimated. Just ask Larry McHugh, the former UConn Board of Trustees chairman. He recalled his trip to watch UConn football play at Notre Dame in November, 2009, and being blown away by more than just the Huskies’ upset victory in double-overtime.
“When I got out there, I saw the baseball and soccer facilities, and when I came back to Storrs and looked at ours (which were substandard) … I believe that is one of the most important things they’re doing right now — renovating soccer, baseball and softball, and getting them up to the standards they should be for the type of programs they’re running,” McHugh said. “Soccer is a nationallyrespected program, baseball as well, and softball is moving forward now.”
The Big East TV deal with Fox Sports brings in about $4.7 million per school. That’s less than what UConn would have received under the AAC’s new ESPN deal. But factor in the increase in ticket sales, donations, general enthusiasm, etc., the decrease in travel, it nearly balances out.
There’s few who would argue UConn is back where it belongs in the Big East. Once again, the right decision was made for the program. This time, UConn can only hope the end results are more positive.
“It was a great opportunity for us to return home,” said Benedict. “We feel like we’ve finally got two feet on the ground and know which direction we’re headed long term. And it’s important to look at things long-term, financially, for the university.”