The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Crisis management
AD Benedict guides UConn through pandemic with changes on the horizon in wake of revenue losses
Changes are coming in college sports. You can sense it. You can feel it. You also can’t substantiate many of them. And if the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, rushing to conclusions is foolish.
We saw what happened last week with UConn president Thomas Katsouleas and Arizona president Robert Robbins. There was Robbins saying he didn’t envision a college football season. Katsouleas expressed similar feelings about all fall sports while speaking online to a UConn journalism class. Speculation caused a social media riot. And this week? Here was Robbins announcing plans to re-open Arizona’s campus for the fall semester.
The undercurrent went from “Wow, this looks really bad” to “Hey, this is looking much better” just like that. The sane course, of course, is to let this thing play out for a couple months before a final decision on scheduling and venues is made on matters that affect millions of people and billions of dollars. Let governors in conjunction with medical experts shepherd us.
But hey, when has sports ever been sane?
OK, end of rant. There are two tangible ways to assess the financial damage already done by COVID-19 to the athletic department of the state’s flagship university.
The NCAA Tournament ordinarily distributes about $600 million among its 350 Division I basketball schools. The cancellation of March Madness because of pandemic cost the NCAA approximately $375 million.
“They reduced their distribution by about twothirds,” UConn athletic director Dave Benedict said. “The distribution is
typically over $2 million for us.”
So that’s a hit of about $1.3 million to UConn.
The second piece is that the fourth quarter of the academic year — April, May, June — is a significant fund-raising time for most athletic departments. A lot of those donations and contributions are part of the season-ticket purchasing process.
“Most of those gifts come in during that time,” Benedict said. “That kind of activity has slowed or come to a halt. With the uncertainties around football and men’s and women’s basketball at this point, obviously there are a lot of questions donors and season ticket holders have that we certainly can’t answer at this time.
“We expected somewhere around $5 million to come in during that process.”
Obviously, COVID-19 will take a big chunk out of that number.
There have been savings: No travel for competition or recruiting. No expense of hosting events. The university is refunding a portion of room and board to all students, and some of that is athletic scholarship money.
Benedict said no one in the athletic department has been furloughed. With most of the employees being union members, he said, any decisions in that area would be made by the university.
A few weeks back, the Group of Five commissioners, including the AAC, asked the NCAA for costcutting relief from certain regulations, including the ability to cut the minimum of 16 sports, eliminate conference tournaments and minimum football attendance and establish shorter seasons for non-revenue sports over the next four years.
This past week the Division I Council rejected the blanket waiver, although it did allow for schools to individually apply.
“My understanding is every conference in Division I outside the Power Five got on board with those requests,” Benedict said. “We’re in an unprecedented time. We’ve all got to figure out ways to manage the crisis.
“With as many unknowns that will impact each of our enterprises, I think people are looking for any and all options to manage the best way you can. There’s a need for flexibility.”
That could mean a lot of things. Yes, it could be the number of sports a college sponsors. Benedict did not want to further comment on the possibility of cutting programs. Yet with Cincinnati recently cutting soccer and Old Dominion cutting wrestling, folks are bracing for cuts by more schools around the nation. The truth is many of these financial problems existed before COVID-19 and the pandemic has caused a tipping point on some campuses.
“I certainly can’t speak for everybody,” Benedict said. “I think the thing it has done, in talking to a lot of my peers around the country, is it has provoked conversations that aren’t necessarily focused on revenues or competitiveness. If you look at the landscape of college athletics a lot has been driven based on those two factors.
“I think there are conversations now that are more focused on how do we continue to create a great experience, but in the most efficient manner that in the end will be best for the student-athlete?”
UConn got a jump in this area with the decision to move the majority of sports from the AAC to the Big East. Last summer, Benedict estimated the savings could be $2 million a year in travel. Still, Creighton, DePaul, Butler,
Marquette and Xavier require flights.
“We traveled as much as anybody (in the AAC),” Benedict said. “That creates a lot of pressure financially and on the students’ health and welfare.
“Especially with the Olympic and non-revenue sports, the conversation right now is why don’t we really regionalize competition? It doesn’t mean you’re changing conferences. It means why don’t you play most of your games and competitions within a bus drive? Most of us could do that in most of our sports. I think there are some productive conversations that are happening right now.”
How would it impact conference schedules? How would it impact RPI? How would it affect automatic qualifiers for NCAA championships?
“Those things need to be worked out,” Benedict said. “Would it help competitiveness? Maybe not in some cases. Would it drive revenue? No, but most of these sports don’t anyway. It would save money. It would keep student-athletes on campus more. I think we can get there and it would be a much better situation for everyone.”
Although UConn men and women belong to Hockey East, Benedict doesn’t envision a proliferation of one-sport conferences. Conferences have NCAA requirements, compliance requirements — a lot of things go into operating a college league.
“It’s very hard to manage a one-sport conference,” Benedict said. “So could there be scheduling consortiums built within multiple conferences?”
Obviously, someone who doesn’t know the history of college sports could take one look at the landscape and ask how the heck did this school end up in this conference? Or how the heck did that school end up there? The only answer: It’s a long story.
“You could create better conferences if all you were focused on was geography,” Benedict said. “Unfortunately, most decisions haven’t been made for geography.”
They’re made on $ football first and $ basketball a distant second. The rest has been television, gravy and ego. A couple hundred sports programs went under as the result of the financial crash of 2008. Who knows how many COVID-19 will claim? We do know the gravy train is stalled. There are some radical ideas out there. Anywhere from cutting scholarships to non-revenue sports to using the European club model of Real Madrid. So UConn plays baseball and softball against Massachusetts and tri-state teams. A few Big East Midwestern teams don’t have baseball, a few others don’t have softball. So the idea doesn’t seem so radical, does it? Ditto schools around the nation. And then hold your breath and hope schools don’t start canceling swimming, track, golf and more.
“If we can’t reimagine (conference alignments), could we at least get conferences to work with one another, especially on sports where there is no revenue coming in?” Benedict said. “The system is being challenged now. In some ways people know the answers. It’s a willingness to move forward and make the difficult decision.
“Everybody is trying to predict and plan for the impact. In some ways it’s difficult to do but in some ways we all expect it to have a significant impact next year. It just depends on how much of an impact. You can’t look the other way this time and say it’s too difficult, too complicated or this won’t work. This (pandemic) is forcing people to have the conversation and be open to solutions.”