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Education Dive
'Major changes' ahead if coronavirus continues to spoil college sports seasons
The NCAA is slashing expected funding, but just how big a blow the
pandemic will deal to major athletics budgets depends on whether
football can kick off.
Jeremy Bauer-Wolf
April 3, 2020
Every aspect of colleges' budgets are suffering from the economic
fallout of the coronavirus, and athletics departments are no exception.
Their bottom lines are likely to be further stressed by a decreased
payout from the NCAA. And observers fear far greater financial
pressures on college sports should the pandemic extend into the fall.
Top NCAA leaders last week approved a $375 million cut to this year's
funding for Division I member leagues, which are composed of the most
expansive athletics programs in the country.
D I conferences will receive a total $225 million, much less than the
nearly $600 million the NCAA initially planned to distribute. This
reduction is a result of the coronavirus forcing the NCAA to cancel the
lucrative D I men's basketball championship, from which it derives
almost all of its revenue.
Division II conferences are expected to receive a little less than $14
million in NCAA revenue, a $30 million dip from last year. Division III
will get about $10.7 million, a $22 million decrease. Overall, each
division will likely lose about 70% of its estimated annual revenue,
according to the NCAA.
How deeply the virus will affect the budgets of major athletics
programs remains unclear for now, as the conferences will largely
determine how much of the NCAA money goes to each institution within
their purview.
Bob Bowlsby, commissioner of D I's Big 12 Conference, told reporters in
a conference call last week the league initially anticipated receiving
$24 million from the NCAA. Now it expects to get about $10 million. All
told, the league will lose about $15 million to $18 million in revenue
due to the coronavirus, Bowlsby said.
The Big 12 is part of the Power Five conferences, which are among the
richest and most influential in Division I. Because of their wealth,
the Power Five will likely not be as financially strained as their
less-affluent counterparts, said Josephine Potuto, a law professor at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a former member of the NCAA's D
I infractions committee. One Big 12 member, the University of Texas at
Austin, took in the most athletics revenue of any NCAA school in the
2017-18 academic year, according to an analysis of institutions'
financial statements by USA Today.
Bowlsby said the conference could draw on reserve funds to help mitigate the financial hit.
Less wealthy conferences weren't left completely without help, though.
The NCAA calculates the distribution to its member conferences through
a complex set of formulas that divide the money into nine funds. In
what was likely an attempt to protect some of the less-wealthy
conferences, Potuto said, the NCAA decided to preserve the full
funding, $53.6 million, in one of the pools that is divided equally
among D I leagues.
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