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Cost Cutting at Division I Colleges Looking in the Wrong Places

There was a very interesting article on the website of the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday detailing some of the cost-cutting measures being implemented at colleges and universities across the west. If you follow college athletics, the litany of measures will not be new to you. Since the advent of the Great Recession, colleges and universities across the spectrum of the NCAA have initiated cost-cutting measures ranging from the elimination of teams, tennis teams have been a favorite target, to a ban on staying in hotels the night before home games, to my favorite, no gifts at league tournaments (the Big Ten's contribution - hey when you're rolling in money, cost-cutting is relative).

The common denominator of all the cost-cutting measures being taken across the country is the disproportionate impact that they are having on Olympic sports. While it's true that Olympic sports don't bring in much revenue, they already receive significantly less funding than do the high revenue and high profile sports of football and men's and women's basketball. The sport that is almost uniformly spared any significant cut is football. It is a sacred cow, to be left untouched for fear that any move to limit spending might cause the golden goose to lay fewer eggs.

The only attempt to reign in the free-spending sport is a limit on the traveling squad permitted to be taken to away games. While certainly positive, it will do nothing to address the arms race that is at the root of the NCAA"s basic financial struggles. Even successful programs don't make money and there are very few schools who can come close to breaking even in good times, much less now. Until spending on football, and to a lesser extent basketball, is brought with some measure of rationality college sports is doomed to a long period of ever increasing decline, with schools finding the ability to provide Olympic sports severely compromised by the money scooped up by football.

HT: SportsBusinessNews.com

Full post as published by Sports Biz on June 08, 2009 (boomark / email).