Somehow, this is Duarte’s fault.
It’s curious how the conference can take this
approach while still planning for football season in
the fall. I would think you would want a consistent
approach to all team sports.
Could just be a purely financial hedge. Don’t spent any money just in case football/basketball, the money sports, don’t work out.
Well , it’s all so convoluted when you talk about
the “money sports“ in college athletics. I mean
football and MBB appear to be the biggest losers
as their revenue does not come close to paying
for their expenses. This is a breakdown from 4 years ago when the school provided 17 million subsidy.
The subsidy in 2019 was reportedly 34 million.
Scroll thru this article to see how the money spirts do.
It looks like you could take the subsidy and fund all the women’s sports. So I guess it comes down to the “free” advertising and awareness factor for MBB
and football. Coogs have made serious runs in NCAA tournaments and that gets your brand talked about and made aware to a greater audience of potential freshmen students. And football is good for 2-3 national broadcasts during a season too. So it’s “financial”, but not in typical accounting sense of financial, if that makes any sense. So the big 2 are
inappropriately called “money sports”; they are the
big PR or positive press sports.
I get it that if women’s BB team won the whole NCAA tournament , it doesn’t create nearly the buzz of football getting a NY day bowl. That’s just life !
But it kinda seems “unfair” in a sense the women athletes have to sacrifice their seasons due to budget “shortfalls” that always exist.
No, that’s nonsense.
Men’s FB and BB are called the “money” sports because they bring in nearly all of the money (90+%) in college sports. This includes ticket sales, TV broadcast revenues and other related items like parking, concessions, caps, shirts, etc.
Big-time college FB programs like UT and ATM make ~$100+ million per year.
Big-time college BB programs like Louisville and Kentucky make ~$30 million per year.
I seriously doubt that any other college sport makes much more than ~$100K per year, if that.