RebKell's Junkie Boards

[greatgator]

NCAA president Emmert: Women’s basketball loses $14 million per year

http://www.hoopfeed.com/content/2016/04/18/ncaa-president-emmert-womens-basketball-loses-14-million-per-year/

[PUmatty]

[Phil]

[taropatch]

[dtrain34]

Yes, women's basketball loses money and for the very explicable reason that most fans don't and likely never will prefer to pay money to watch it.

However, under current federal law, women's sports at football schools need to spend and spend and spend to keep the Title IX numbers right so fans of CWBB have no fear of anything being done to balance that $14 million out.

[Phil]

[pilight]

[ClayK]

Of course, I question the accounting for college sports -- if it was truly that big a money-loser, I'm pretty sure a lot fewer universities would have Division I sports. The ancillary gains (donors, applications, alumni interest) wouldn't be in a financial report.

As for women's basketball, here's an easy way to save $5 million: Eliminate conference tournaments. The only reason they exist is because the men have them. The attendance is bad, and the occasional Cinderella in a mid-major conference immediately gets clocked in the NCAA tournament and the regular season winner gets relegated to the WNIT.

I wonder if women's basketball would still be the biggest money-loser if conference tournaments were eliminated. Baseball isn't cheap ....

Final point: Presumably scholarships are counted as a cost in tallying up the bottom line for each sport. If so, then the extra women's scholarships necessary to balance out football should be charged to football, not the women's sports.

_________________
Oṃ T�re Tutt�re Ture Sv�h�

[ArtBest23]

I think that $14 million cited by Emmert refers only to the NCAA's loss on running the WBB tournament. It's in the context of describing how the money made on the MBB tournament is spent by the NCAA. I don't think that number has anything at all to do with how much the 300+ colleges lose on WBB, which would be a vastly larger number. Nor do I think Emmert was saying WBB was the largest money loser for the individual schools. It might or might not be, but that's not what he was talking about.

But I don't understand the notion that "if schools lost money they wouldn't do it." Schools have supported interscholastic sports for at least a century. High schools do it. Grade schools do it. It's just like financially supporting the band or the debate team. It's part of what they do. It has nothing to do with making or losing money. Which of course is why making as much money on football is so important to so many schools, because they'd rather make money to fund the rest of the sports that way than use tuition or public money.

And of course the very existence of athletic programs at Div II, Div III, NAIA, and other minor federation schools disproves the notion that "if they lost money they wouldn't do it" because certainly none of those are self sustaining.

Finally, I think the conference tournaments are paid for by the conferences out of the conference revenue. From the individual schools' standpoint, it's just like another game. So I don't think that's a big driver of school losses.

[Phil]

I briefly looked into some of the accounting issues and agree with Clay that there are questions worth asking.

I'm not starting with the assumption that schools are doing anything deliberately wrong, just that the accounting for some items is tough for them one might realize.

For example, U of X receives licensing fees for the use of their images and logos on clothing and other items. These fees aggregate in the tens of millions at least. When a person buys a sweatshirt with the school logo, is it because of the sports team or their interest in the academic side? One might guess that a specific logo such as the U of X Unknowns was because of the sports team, while the U of X logo with something other than sports, but who is to know? I won't be surprised if all such fees accrued to the University and are not allocated to the athletic department. If some are at allocated to the athletic department, how to figure out how much goes to the women's basketball team versus the men's versus the lacrosse team versus soccer team etc. etc.? It may be more work than it is worth to do allocations at that level, so I won't be surprised if some people by clothing with logos specific week because of one particular sports team but the fees and up in a more general fund.

I was recently asked to contribute to university — the general fund, not the athletic fund. Such donations are probably not attributed to the athletic department even though my interest in the sports team is key to the donation.

The net income and loss statement charges the scholarships to the athletic team, understandably. However, some scholarships are funded either partially or fully from outside sources. Is that considered in the calculation? I would hope so but I don't know.

Does success in sports translate into increased funding of state schools? I can easily argue that it should not, but the evidence is that it does. This item along may dwarf the financial impact of the athletic budgets.

[Phil]

[patsweetpat]

[Durantula]

I also believe the $14 million is just off the NCAA tournament but I'm trying to think of the biggest drivers behind the cost. I thought I heard the NCAA provides chartered flights for all teams. Don't teams also travel with cheerleaders and their band? Are they flying too? Some chartered planes are small, so if they can't fit all the cheerleaders and band is it multiple flights per team? Then hotel costs clearly factor in. I think the NCAA now pays for parents to travel to the Final 4, so that's roundtrip flights for maybe 100 or more people. Still seems so high, can't imagine just the flights and hotels are $14 mil.

[ClayK]

[pilight]

[ArtBest23]

[taropatch]

[taropatch]

[Phil]

[Phil]

While looking for more information about the dates associated with the 14 million, I stumbled across this, which may be of interest:

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20150322/OPINION03/150329834

The NCAA's annual men's basketball tournament, which started Tuesday, is both a great athletic contest and a crassly commercial enterprise — a dichotomy common to college sports that has led to legal and ethical questions about whether student athletes should be paid and organized like professional employees of their universities. Even aside from the confused status of student athletes, college sports is burdened with myths. Here are five of the most common ones.
1. College sports provide enormous profits for schools. ...

Read the whole thing

[Phil]

This:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ncaa-isnt-going-broke-no-matter-how-much-you-hear-it/?ex_cid=story-twitter

is interesting reading, if only to see the discussion of the financial woes of Yale, vis-a-vis athletics in....1902.

[ClayK]

[ArtBest23]

[ridor]

Why don't the conference schools get to rotate and host their conference tournaments rather than using the public arena in a neutral area, would it help to save money?

[Oldfandepot2]

HBO's Real Sports just did a story on how there are only 12 schools (which they did not name) who actually make money or break even of the 300+ Division I Athletic Departments. The burden for making up the deficit comes from student activity fees some as much as a thousand dollars a year if not more. The majority of those students neither attend or participate in extracurricular activities.

The story other than watching on the HBO app or your provider can not be linked here yet. It is still airing on DirecTV.

_________________
Cave Canem!
We must listen to each other no matter how much it hurts. Bishop Desmond Tutu.