It’s said that the main difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich have more money. Makes good sense, especially during our current economic maelstrom. Yet this financial firestorm has even the rich among us, including the wealthiest athletic programs, looking grimly over their shoulders.
THE Ohio State University (“the” is their formal title) may have the lushest current athletic budget in the country, around $115 million. That’s well over twice the current $55 million sports budget for Kansas University.
OSU athletic director Gene Smith says the Buckeyes’ sports department is due to lose money during the fiscal year ending June 30. Revenues are lagging $300,000 to $500,000; already OSU plans to raise 2009-10 ticket prices $1 per game for football and basketball, except for students.
OSU is also cutting costs by letting only essential personnel go to road events, as well as trimming expense accounts. If such belt-tightening hasn’t begun on every college campus, you know it’s coming, including throughout the Big 12.
“We’re behind a little on revenue in basketball — single-game tickets, concessions . . . ” says Ohio State AD Smith. “Once the economy started to shift, somewhere in October, we started to say, ‘Hey, this is going to hit us.’ It hit basketball in particular. We’re not hitting the single-game goals we hoped to achieve.”
Smith says OSU won’t cut any of its 36 sports, the highest number for any college. But other things will get the ax. Like everywhere else. A Buckeye football ticket will cost $63 next fall, a basketball ducat $27. There’ll be another dollar lug in the fall of ’10.
Geese laying fewer golden eggs, chickens coming home to roost, everybody’s scuffling. People with shortfalls are finding other uses for what money they can get. You see schools like Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Texas and Tennessee with their huge 100,000-type arenas and solid basketball programs, and tend to think they’re immune to hard times. This deep recession may linger for quite a painful while.
In the Big 12, the money magnets are Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas A&M, with KU somewhere in the middle. Texas has a $100 million budget but even the Longhorns will be hooked. KU will feel pinches.
Even before the ’08-09 crunch, only 10 percent of NCAA Division I schools had athletic departments supporting themselves. The rest got by with more than $1 billion in student fees, general school funds, other subsidies. Without financial aid, the average school would have lost $5.7 million last year, according to an Indianapolis Star study. Earlier spending sprees have been darn near obscene; few are shedding tears about this moment of overdue truth.
Says Rodney Fort, a sports economist at Washington State U., “College sports is the only business in America that has no bottom-line responsibilities (though you have to wonder about Wall Street and banking weenies). “Even non-profits have to watch the bottom line to some degree.” Starting when? How about now?
Murray Sperber, Indiana U. expert, calls college sports “the most dysfunctional business in America.” Disgustingly, our cascading economics collapses of 2008-09 have produced new members of that devastating club.
