Was thinking about Stanford cutting 11 sports... decided to look at the latest Department of Education data on operating and scholarship expenses to see how much they are really saving in terms of what gets spent on the college athletes themselves.

The critical number is the one in the lower right, highlighted in yellow, on each chart.

Bottom line is that Stanford is slashing their athlete expenses by over 20%, or $8.24 million in real dollars in the academic year starting 09/01/2018 for reporting purposes.

I did not include coaching salaries for the following reasons:

1. The Dept. of Education data is not broken down in terms of individual coaching salaries.

2. It really doesn't matter, because the point is to look at what is spent directly on ATHLETES.

You can access all this data through the Equity in Athletics Data Analysis website from the Dept. of Education by following this link.

https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/ 

Digging further, you might notice that expenses spent on average per athlete goes up after cuts.

What that means is that those sports cut were ones that cost the least to operate -- & for which scholarships were spread as partial payouts between a far larger group of athletes.

On average, for the 11 sports cut, Stanford spent an average of $5,264 per athlete in operating expenses.

Stanford's average operating expenses per athlete for all sports were more than twice as much -- $10,738 to be exact.

Why is this important?

This is either A) a fundraising scam to get alumni to pony up that $8.24 million to cover scholarships and expenses or B) a realization that students will enroll and pay the sticker price w/o that scholarship subsidizing part of their education.

Either way, Stanford takes it all the way to the bank.

One more point about coaching salaries... any relevant expenses saved on salaries won't be realized until buyouts are calculated into the equation -- something we'll never know conclusively since Stanford never has to report that data as a private school. https://twitter.com/zbigalke/status/1281081426558025729?s=20

Some other food for thought in this great thread about potential redistribution of athletic endowments and the legal issues around those endowments might factor into Stanford's decision... https://twitter.com/andyhre/status/1280926623584227329?s=19