Football season or not, A&M needs cash
COLLEGE STATION — Texas A&M athletic director Ross Bjork will keep a close eye on the Astros, Rangers and all 28 other Major League Baseball teams in the coming days and weeks.
Not only because Bjork is a baseball fan, but because MLB’s early results, along with the scheduled starts of NFL training camps this month, might help determine the immediate future of A&M’s most prominent sport.
“We need a little more time and a little more data,” Bjork said Tuesday of any final decisions on whether fall college football will be played during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I also think we need society’s permission. Meaning, what happens when baseball starts on Thursday? What happens when NFL camps start and we have those visuals of players playing games and practicing and with some baseball fans in the stands at some ballparks?
“Will society start to say, ‘We can get used to this; there’s a safe way to do this — as safe as possible?’ ”
With August fast approaching, more questions than answers remain on whether college foot
ball will be played this fall. Along the way Travis Dabney hopes to clear up what he considers at least one fallacy concerning the Aggies’ overall finances.
Dabney, president of A&M sports’ fundraising arm the 12th Man Foundation, certainly appreciates the Aggies’ lofty perch among money-raising athletic programs, but the pandemic has amplified the foundation’s apprehensions as the summer presses on.
“The thing I would want donors to know more than anything is there are a lot of misconceptions out there about how athletic departments are funded,” Dabney said Tuesday. “There’s always this information out there about, ‘Look at Texas A&M, one of the top five most profitable athletic departments in the country.’ The reality is … at the end of the day, we have expenditures here pretty closely matching up with our revenues.
“We need our season ticket holders (and) we need our donors who help fund $65 million of a $150 million (annual) budget to be with us.”
Sticking with A&M in late July and perhaps well into August, Dabney added, means season ticket holders and donors not rushing to any decisions with college football’s immediate future undecided.
“I’m asking our season ticket holders to wait with us,” said Dabney, a former student who added that he proudly recognizes A&M donors to be among the most loyal and giving in the country. “Let’s get some clarity, and let’s understand our situation. Right now there are people who could potentially make decisions without complete information.”
The five athletic departments that generated the most revenue for the 2018-19 school year were Texas ($223,879,781), Texas A&M ($212,748,002) Ohio State ($210,548,239), Michigan ($197,820,410) and Georgia ($174,042,482), according to a USA Today database.
Last week, Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey said after meeting with the league’s 14 athletic directors that the SEC would wait until the end of the month to make any further decisions on fall football, a move that pleased Bjork after the Big Ten and Pac-12 already opted for conference-only schedules.
“I believe we still have some time, ‘some’ being the key word,” Bjork said. “We know the clock is ticking. … We have to do everything we can to make it as safe as possible, and as I sit here today, we need a few more data points. We need our communities to trend in a better direction in terms of total number of cases, hospitalizations … we need some good data within our communities.
“We haven’t started a fullfledged (football) practice yet, so we don’t know exactly what is going to happen when we start engaging in contact practices. … What happens when we start bringing back college students to College Station? We still need time to make a final decision. Does that mean we may delay the season? Perhaps that’s an opportunity.”
Bjork, who just wrapped up his first year at A&M, is optimistic delaying the season a few weeks or into the winter will be a secondary scenario still enabling a (mostly) full season. As of today, per Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive, Kyle Field would be at 50 percent capacity Sept. 5 for Texas A&M’s opener against Abilene Christian.
If those optimistic plans of starting on time or even delaying the start of the season fall through, A&M, like most Power Five athletic departments nationwide, will turn to Plan C-note: Rely on loyal donors to keep the department afloat sliding into 2021.
“If we’re not playing college football or we don’t have fans in the stands or either one of those, it’s a devastating, dramatic impact on our operating budget,” Bjork said. “We’re not subsidized by the university — we’re 100 percent self-sustaining. If there are no fall sports, there is no magic formula for making up that revenue.
“That’s when we’ll go on a campaign to ask people to support the athletic department during this unprecedented, most difficult time. We would ask people to maintain any sort of giving, ask people to donate perhaps the value of their season tickets that they’ve already paid. We would ask people to support the athletic department to ensure we can get through this.”