The Big Ten convention and the University of Connecticut made headlines Wednesday morning, but for other reasons completely in a completely different season.
In this 2020 school football season where autonomous decision-making is the new general technique for an outdated commercial precept (i.e., the survival of the most financially fit), we see the Big Ten announce a 10-game convention only. Football schedule, while Connecticut, recently independent, announced that it would not play football in 2020, fitting the first football program of the FBS Division to cancel its entire season.
Divergent decisions are just a byproduct of the divergent monetary realities that schools face when it comes to school football. Consider the monetary knowledge for football in the 2018 season. Revenue knowledge comes from Equity in Athletics in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education, and expense knowledge comes from the Knight Commission’s college athletics database. The Knight Commission source does not disclose knowledge for personal schools, so I used the average football spending of the top 10 schools as an approximation of Northwestern football spending.
Looking at the data, it’s quite transparent that the Big 10 is in a completely different monetary stratosphere when it comes to school football than Connecticut.
According to 2018 data, Big 10 High School generates more than $40 million in profits through its school football program. Meanwhile, Connecticut’s football program outperformed that year, earning nearly 90 times less than Big Ten High School with a profit of $457,868.
And that hole would have been even bigger without the atypical value of Rutgers football, the Big Ten school that lost cash through football operations in 2018.
Moreover, these 2018 estimates of football’s profits overestimator UConn’s monetary realities today. According to an ESPN report this morning:
As we have already noticed this summer regarding university athletics in general, which faces the abyss of the exploitation of university play in the midst of an invisible and unpredictable enemy (Covid-19) who wreaks havoc on the functioning and fitness of people, it feels very wild to the wild west.
And it sounds a lot like the story of two monetary realities. And those discrepancies will correlate with a school’s risk appetite.
UConn’s athletic director was quoted in the ESPN article discussed above saying: “After receiving recommendations from public and state fitness officials and consulting with football students-athletes, we don’t have to compete on the grid this season. COVID-19 puts our student-athletes in football at an unacceptable risk point.”
Great public statement, however, as knowledge shows, is also monetaryly transparent that UConn football cost-benefit research transparently shows that, for them, juice (football benefits) is not the value of tension (the prices of getting mandatory resources to ensure the protection of student athletes in the midst of a pandemic).
On the contrary, with approximately $552 million a year in cash for national television dating back to the Big Ten (according to the SportsAtlas knowledge base of the Sports Business JournalArray … $112 million from Big Ten Network, $240 million from Fox, $190 ESPN, $10 million from CBS Sports Network), there is much to gain financially for those schools when watching the 2020 football season… even if it’s just a convention program.
While the timing at UConn (i.e., the transition outside the AAFC) is something that is likely to contribute to its resolution today, the fact is that there are several other FBS Division I school football systems whose monetary scenario is particularly worse. Using the 2018 monetary knowledge of previous resources and focusing strictly on the 107 FBS public schools, UConn’s football earnings in 2018 ranked 72.
As a result, at least in 2018, there were 35 other audiences who earned less cash from football than UConn. In fact, among those subsets of 35:
The fact is that if Connecticut can close its 2020 football season, there are many other FBS Division I systems that can do the same.
And while they would possibly say it’s because of the fitness and protection of their student-athletes, we must also realize that football’s cost-benefit research this fall will lead some schools to follow in UConn’s footsteps.
Similarly, Power Five meetings continue and do their best for the entire 2020 school football season.
In a giant component because its cost-benefit calculation leads to another internal conclusion for the maximum of those schools. Much more profit-generating through much more lucrative TV contracts with Power Five conferences, which makes it less difficult for those schools to spend more financially on additional resources to take certain greater protective precautions for their student-athletes in the middle of the pandemic.
I am the founding director of the Sports Business Program at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as a professor of sports business practice within his Olin.
I am the founding director of the Sports Business Program at Washington University in St. Louis, as a professor of sports business practice at his Olin Business School. I am also the founder and CEO of Sportsimpacts, where I have conducted more than 85 studies since the company’s inception in 2000Array.. adding searches in 3 Super Bowls, 3 Final Fours, MLB All-Star Games, Ryder Cups and many divisions. I have NCAA championship events. www.patrickrishe.com