Leaderboard

One thing I think many have failed to acknowledge is that this day has been coming for some time. It has only been accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis. We can debate the cause of the problems and the finances all day every day, but the reality is that these are all issues that have been on the horizon for some time but that have aggravated and exacerbated by poor leadership and planning by those in power at the university and the NCAA. At this juncture, the university has to chart a course without regard to the territorialism of the respective sports programs and stick with the plan in the face of the inevitable protests and whining. The plan also has to involve making difficult objective choices rather than just cutting the low hanging fruit.

A topic worthy of a GP1 post. This is an important issue for changing times. Now is a critical time for college athletics. I would encourage the University to act boldly but smartly as it looks at these decisions. Tinkering around with the budget is necessary and hard decisions are required, but look towards the future of college athletics and what may take shape. Schools like ours can help shape our future or have the future shape us. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had a lifetime of the changes in college athletics shaping us for the worse and would like to try something different where we shape our own future. Whatever UofA decides to do, it cannot be done in a vacuum similar to when the school made a unilateral decision to go D1A. History shows this doesn’t work for us. There is strength in numbers (as long as the numbers don’t sink your ship) and we need to partner with our conference and the other G5 conferences to hammer out something better for ourselves. If we do not, we are just picking around the edges of failure that will be worse for us than the current environment presents. Power 5 schools/conferences are going to take advantage of this downturn to examine their business framework and make changes that are only going to benefit them, and they should. The truth is they are being held back by the NCAA and the rest college athletics, which simply does not match what they are trying to accomplish. Years ago, I brought up G5 schools divorcing themselves from the P5 schools before THEY divorced us and start our own division. This week I was watching ESPN and the issue of P5 conferences using this downturn to set up their own “division” or whatever you want to call it was being discussed. There has never been a better time for them to do this. In fact, they have ZERO to lose. I would go as far as to say the framework is already there and all they need to do now is give a boot to the NCAA and take control of the 40% cut the NCAA gets out of the $700,000,000 produced with March Madness while not having to share the rest with G5 conferences. Captain Kangaroo is correct. There is a lack of leadership at UofA. Leadership starts with a vision and bringing that vision to life. Starting a D1A football program in 1987 while playing in the Rubber Bowl of all places with a weight room in the bottom floor of the basketball arena and limited scholarships does not show good leadership. Building a football stadium is a good resume boost for bureaucrats, but not a vision for the future unless you believe in magic. Playing games on Tuesday and Wednesday nights in front of empty stadiums on national TV to get the TV revenue is a boost for the bureaucrats who run athletic departments into the ground and somehow their resumes benefit from this, but it has had disastrous consequences for the MAC. The MAC is a shell of the football league it was before this nonsense started. This is our history and the facts are painful. Good leadership would accept those facts, stop the magical thinking and look for a better way forward. So how do we get from here to there? Crawl-Walk-Run. At some point, some president of some G5 university needs to call for the organization of some kind of committee to examine the future of college athletics for their schools/conferences without P5 schools and chart a course forward where G5 conferences can find success at their level of ability. The committee should have many more business and community leaders than athletic directors. Harness the brain power of these people for crying out loud and stop listening to the athletic directors with Sports Administration degrees. I would discourage any current athletic directors from being on the committee as it is obvious these people do not act in the interest of their schools and are little more than bureaucrats solely interested in maintaining the power of their bureaucracy. Have some former athletic director because they will be the ones who know the dirty secrets, but don’t have too many of these people and don’t let one run the committee. There are over 60 G5 schools, which would make for a great college football division where fans and alumni could go to games, retouch their universities and see those schools as a source of enjoyment/entertainment. Examine everything including the reckless behavior exhibited by conference leaders that will harm the conferences in favor of bringing in another nickel. As far as the rest of college athletics, they are on their own and we should not concern ourselves with them. There will be a ton of private schools that simply are not going to be able to financially survive this period. I don’t mean the Harvards of the world with their giant endowments, but the smaller OAC type schools with small endowments charging student loan requiring high prices for unimpressive students to attend their schools to get unimpressive degrees from learning from unimpressive professors. This game is coming to a quick close so they should not be included in our future because their future is bleak. Want to increase UofA enrollment? Pray for the quick demise of these schools and the dorms will be full of these students. D2? Whatever, they are on their own as well. FCS? Good luck to them and I mean that, but they should not be our worry and we should not go down the road of bringing them on board just to have a big division. There are far more Southern Utahs than North Dakota States. “What got us here won’t get us there” is a good business leadership statement and the misconception is it applies to successful organizations, but it applies to all organizations. If we and the rest of the G5 schools continue to do what we have done in the past, which isn’t working, we won’t get to where we need to be. Find a different road. Stay safe and go wash your hands.

Really looking forward to seeing Brian Trimble after hearing Groce's comments. Sounds like he's a next level shooter and should help replace some of the shooting they lose to graduation. Sounds like he can handle the ball too which brings some real value, like Tyler Cheese, when LCJ is off of the floor. He and Daily are going to give the Zips some dangerous wing players. I understood KD's approach in focusing on freshmen, but the infusion of transfers (e.g. X, Riak. LCJ) and JUCOs (Cheese, Banks, Reece) has added a lot of excitement to the program. Dailey, Trimble and Currie will be a huge infusion of talent.

I push no narrative, I give you facts. The University of Akron paid for its $34.9 million sports program last year in large part with a $24.3 million university contribution from non-athletic sources, the school reported in its financial filing with the NCAA for the 2017-2018 school year. The subsidy was reported as “direct institutional support.” This includes, according to NCAA reporting requirements, any support the school provided to the athletic department from state money, tuition, tuition discounts, federal work study programs and more. The subsidy amounted to 70 percent of Akron’s sports budget. Based on Akron’s total enrollment, the $24.3 million subsidy amounted to $1,359 per student. Ohio State is the only public university in Ohio that operates its athletic program without a subsidy from non-athletic sources. No matter how you spin this Akron Athletics is losing money, has been losing money since the move to Division I, and without this ATHLETICS TAX on the students there would not be enough money to fund the program at the current levels. If you cannot see this, you are blind and cannot add and subtract. Low ticket sales and low donations = low interest. Truth hurts.

Obviously this is a very passionate discussion for most on here. Unsure how much of a difference, if any, it might make right now, but if anyone wants their voice heard I might recommend considering making a restricted donation to the sport(s) of your preference. https://gozips.com/sports/2017/5/25/zfund-Ways-to-Give-Sport-Specific.aspx

Competition has hurt too. Having a community college “right next door” (and in Barberton) has done a number on enrollment. Both for the two year programs, and for four year students looking at a more cost conscious first two years (I went to Wayne and Medina to save money). These students who go to Stark don’t feel a bond with Akron like Wayne/Medina/Polsky students. KSU and CSU are just as much in their decision making as Akron.

#1 priority should be increasing enrollment. We had 19k in enrollment in fall of 2019 as opposed to 26k in fall of 2014 and 30k in 2010. The U spent all that money expecting 30k+ enrollment and now we are down close to half of our peak. Its no wonder we are in the position we are now. Increasing enrollment fixes everything. Unfortunately the constant turnover and bad PR over the past ~7 years makes it a hell of a lot harder than it needs to be!

Please no

That 12 million includes 4.3 million for the football stadium. Eliminating the football program in its entirety reduces 7.7 million in expenses, not 12 million. A buy game is going for 1.25 million. We could and should be scheduling 2 of those per year. That would be an additional 1.25 million in revenue above the numbers you posted. I also mentioned cutting coaching salaries. Edit: Not to mention the additional travel costs for the other sports If we left the MAC as no other conference is as good as a regional fit for us as the MAC.

If you cut football, you're also cutting all the revenue that comes with football (cfp money, tv deal, buy game guarantees, ticket sales, advertisements, etc). Football probably is responsible for 70%, if not more, of the athletics non-subsidy revenue. Outside of Infocision, which we're stuck paying regardless of what we do, football is the closest thing we have to a revenue neutral sport. There is still plenty of fat to trim from the football program though. For one our coach shouldn't be making $500k. Assistant salaries are bloated too. At a $500k salary a coach should be packing Infocision. We haven't been getting that. The athletic student aid section is heavily inflated IMO. The school charges the athletic department the full cost of attendance, but the marginal cost of rooming and boarding ~400 extra scholarship athletes is less than ~30k per student. Besides schools are in the business of educating. What bothers me is the money that gets blown on coaches, administration, and over the top facility upgrades.

In simple terms, that's a lot of money for bad football.

For him. LOL.

If you play football you have to sponsor 16 sports, minimum. 6 must be men's sports. Athletics Head count / Gender needs to be within 1% of campus full time enrollees, which was 50.6 male / 49.4 female for 2019. Stupid addition of Baseball makes cutting $$$ harder. No one is adding non-revenue sports but Akron did. Dumb move then, ever more so now. 407 total athletes for Akron 2018-19. https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/institution/details Nothing makes sense to cut other than FOOTBALL (110) or TRACK & FIELD / CROSS COUNTRY as both are HUGE head count sports that can impact the financial side directly through scholarships and support staff salaries/benefits. Not going to cut football as you have the stadium and revenues that come in. Cutting golf solves nothing. No funding and low head count. Cut Track & Field / Cross Country and you can make up $$$. Would have to add in a cheap men's sport like Tennis as that would get you back up to 6 men's sports. Still not going to make up 6-7 million bucks. Smart play is dropping football as it really has no value back for the school. The debt service on Infocision Stadium is the ONLY reason football will survive.

Petition was denied. https://www.oregonlive.com/sports/2020/04/ncaa-denies-request-to-drop-division-i-sport-minimum.html

Or the details are already known, just not made public. I hope President Miller knows better than to make a blanket statement like that and realizes the negative effect it can have on programs by not being transparent, leading us into further spiral.

I know it is a sore spot with many, but the last guy that proposed budget cuts was Scarborough and he was run out of town on a rail. He was brought in to be the bad guy and make cuts then was run in part for being the bad guy and making cuts. He didn't have the COVID-19 crisis for cover. Don't get me wrong, he messed up plenty, but he was the budget cuts guy.

The athletic program can't be all things to all people. My son attended a snooty east coast school that played top notch D1 men's and women's basketball and participated in lower level leagues in every other sport. Schools need to pick their poison. Do you think anyone really cares about the football teams of Gonzaga, Butler or Georgetown? I get that this is a football area, but if UA bases its decisions on historic success, football is in trouble while soccer and basketball should be less impacted.

If they eliminate tennis, swim team, volleyball, most the good looking women will be eliminated as well. Another factor to consider?