The biggest elephant in the room especially with what's going on right now in the country.......is non-revenue, non ticketed, non-mandatory donation sports that don't bring in squat... I've seen 35-40,000 fans a game at the RENT for an entire decade....it could happen again if the coaches weren't losers......
Below is the bigger problem for the AD because even if they win these numbers will never change for all these sports:
Other Uconn sports : $2.8 mil revenue, $25.8 mil expenses
Lots of discussion with Jacobs about non-revenue sports:
"The cancellation of March Madness because of pandemic cost the NCAA approximately $375 million......“They reduced their distribution by about two-thirds,” UConn athletic director Dave Benedict said. “The distribution is typically over $2 million for us.”.....So that’s a hit of about $1.3 million to UConn."
"A few weeks back, the Group of Five commissioners, including the AAC, asked the NCAA for cost-cutting relief from certain regulations,
including the ability to cut the minimum of 16 sports, eliminate conference tournaments and minimum football attendance and
establish shorter seasons for non-revenue sports over the next four years.....“My understanding is every conference in Division I outside the Power Five got on board with those requests,” Benedict said. “We’re in an unprecedented time. We’ve all got to figure out ways to manage the crisis.......That could mean a lot of things.
Yes, it could be the number of sports a college sponsors. Benedict did not want to further comment on the possibility of cutting programs."
"UConn got a jump in this area with the decision to move the majority of sports from the AAC to the Big East. Last summer,
Benedict estimated the savings could be $2 million a year in travel. Still, Creighton, DePaul, Butler, Marquette and Xavier require flights.......
Especially with the Olympic and non-revenue sports, the conversation right now is why don’t we really regionalize competition? It doesn’t mean you’re changing conferences. It means why don’t you play most of your games and competitions within a bus drive? Most of us could do that in most of our sports. "
“You could create better conferences if all you were focused on was geography,” Benedict said. “Unfortunately, most decisions haven’t been made for geography.”......They’re made on $ football first and $ basketball a distant second. The rest has been television, gravy and ego. A couple hundred sports programs went under as the result of the financial crash of 2008. Who knows how many COVID-19 will claim? We do know the gravy train is stalled. There are some radical ideas out there.
Anywhere from cutting scholarships to non-revenue sports to using the European club model of Real Madrid........
And then hold your breath and hope schools don’t start canceling swimming, track, golf and more."......“If we can’t reimagine (conference alignments), could we
at least get conferences to work with one another, especially on sports where there is no revenue coming in?”