Follow Florida Tech’s example
Bianchi: Egos put aside and football dropped, saving smaller sports.
The school administrators at Division II Florida Tech put their egos aside earlier this week and came to a hard, honest and fiscally prudent determination.
Unlike many of their delusional big brothers at the FBS level, they decided not to put a Band-Aid on their budgetary deficit by cutting their cross country or rowing team and instead decided to take the plunge and discontinue a football program that had become a money pit.
“We didn’t just suddenly come to the decision to drop football this week; it’s been a conversation for quite some time,” Florida Tech athletics director Pete Mazzone says.“We’re a small private school that relies heavily on tuition to fund our athletic program, and we expect to take a hit in tuition. We’re struggling right now and football is our biggest athletic expense.”
The multi-million-dollar question is when will bottom-feeding FBS programs like, say, Akron come to the same uncomfortable conclusion that they simply cannot afford the massive financial drain of fielding a football team amid the historic budgetary crisis brought on by the global pandemic.
Instead, Akron announced on Thursday it is cutting its poor little men’s cross country, men’s golf and women’s tennis teams while the 0-12 football team will continue to suck up the brunt of the taxpayer-subsidized athletic budget while averaging an “announced” attendance of 17,959 fans per
game.
Who are we kidding here, folks?
If this were all about dollars and sense, Akron would have cut the football team and kept the women’s tennis team. It would have saved the university a lot more money.
As colleges and universities throughout the nation struggle to figure out how to pay their bills, does it really make budgetary sense for Akron and other lower level FBS programs to field football teams that have always been a financial drain on their universities?
Former Akron president Matthew Wilson said it best back in 2018 when he told Cleveland.com the football program is “bleeding” money.
There is a flawed perception out there that football is the biggest money-maker for college athletic programs. Yes, this is obviously true in the bigboy conferences like the SEC and Big Ten, but in little-guy leagues like the Mid-American Conference, football is actually the biggest money-loser. In conferences like the MAC, attendance is low, expenses are high and there there are no mega-million-dollar TV deals to cover the costs like there is at perennial Power 5 also-rans like Vanderbilt.
The Knight Commission on College Athletics did a financial study in 2018 and found that the MAC’s total athletic revenue for all 12 schools was nearly $400 million, but nearly 70% of that revenue came from institutional and government support along with student fees.
Translation: MAC universities, state governments and students themselves are contributing hundreds of millions of dollars annually just so Akron’s football team can go 0-12 and pay their coach $500,000 a year.
Then, of course, there’s the attendance scam many lower-level FBS programs partake in just so they can meet the NCAA minimum requirement of averaging at least 15,000 fans per game. It’s no secret that some schools are pretty much buying tickets themselves, giving them away and counting them as part of the “paid” attendance numbers they turn in to the NCAA.
Rule of thumb: If you have to buy tickets to your own games to be considered big-time, then you don’t belong in the bigtime.
Don’t get me wrong, I love college football and believe having a team does generate enthusiasm and campus spirit. However, the constant claims that having a football team actually boosts student enrollment always seemed nebulous, vague and unquantifiable to me. Maybe Alabama gets an enrollment boost because of its football team, but does Akron?
Yes football is great benefit to have — as long as you can afford it. But how many cash-strapped, lower-level FBS schools will rightfully be able to justify the expense moving forward?
The financial predictions for higher education are frightening and could cripple colleges and universities of all sizes. As an example, just look at the state of Florida, where universities are funded in two major ways: student enrollment and government funding.
Well, guess what? Student enrollment is predicted to plummet and state funding is likely be slashed because the tourism industry is on a months-long hiatus and massive unemployment payments are decimating state coffers.
Florida Tech came to the hard, honest conclusion earlier this week that it simply couldn’t afford the financial drain of its football program any longer.
When the move was announced, school president Dwayne McCay wrote a letter to the campus community in which he stated, “The unprecedented uncertainty created by
COVID-19 makes these moves prudent, but no less painful. We must do what is necessary to preserve resources critical to our educational mission.”
In other words, it’s much cheaper to keep the women’s swimming team than the football team.
When will other schools put their macho egos aside and come to the same realization?