There won't be a single profitable college athletic department in 2020.

Time for a thread

1) Simply put, yesterday was a sad day for college football.

The Big Ten and Pac-12 both cancelled fall sports, including football, with a potential plan to resume next spring. https://twitter.com/RossDellenger/status/1293273458743410694

2) The ACC said they “will continue to make decisions based on medical advice” but still plan to move forward with the 2020 season. https://twitter.com/theACC/status/1293302212677062658

3) The Big 12 is rumored to be planning a revised schedule and the SEC is so committed to playing football in 2020 that USC Athletic Director Ray Tanner talked about potentially having ~20,000 fans in attendance this year..

You gotta love the SEC. https://twitter.com/JoshTheAthletic/status/1293284549380767745

4) The financial impact?

The NCAA is pretty irrelevant in this situation.

Over 80% of their revenue comes from March Madness and they failed to give so much as an opinion on what conferences should do over the last 5 months, partially in an effort to hold March Madness in 2021.

5) From a conference point of view, the revenue loss is more serious.

The Big Ten’s current TV deals with ESPN/Fox Sports amount to $2.6 billion over six years.

It’s unclear what insurance protection they have, but individual schools could lose ~$54M each ( @frntofficesport).

6) Realistically, conferences will survive and media rights are only part of the story.

The more concerning part is how schools will fund other sports next year with no revenue from the football program.

7) Let's take a look at Alabama, the "gold standard" of athletic departments.

Alabama turned a profit in only 2 sports in 2019:
Football - $25.5M
Mens Basketball - $62k

Biggest losers?
Mens Baseball - ($3M)
Womens Basketball - ($2.8M)

Alabama athletics made about $3M in total.

8) Without football, Alabama's athletic department would've lost $20M+ last year.

Obviously other fall sports, and their respective losses, need to be stripped out as well.

But it’s eye-opening how much football programs carry the financial load for most athletic departments.

9) Alabama has a $1.5B endowment and will come out unscathed.

What about small schools who don't have the financial resources to support non-profitable sports?

An NCAA study claims “only 20 of the 1,000 or so college sports programs in the nation were profitable"( @nytimes).

10) There’s some creative accounting, but most schools aren’t Alabama either.

If CFB is cancelled, we might not see a single athletic department turn a profit in 2020.

The top schools are barely profitable - now FB revenue plummets and they still have expenses (salaries, etc.).

11) Throughout this tumultuous offseason, one thing has become abundantly clear.

The business of college football is too large not to have a leader at the top able to appropriately make decisions and delegate downstream.

12) People claim to hate the commissioner-owner model the NFL employs, but at least they have a plan in place to play football this fall.

With each conference listening to different medical experts, and making their own decisions, it’s become a chaotic mess.

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