Every school in the MAC (and nearly every G5 school) losses money on college basketball. Only a few schools in the MWC profit from men's basketball.

Top 2 take the most buy games it seems. Many of the middle play even games against the Horizon which basically are cost of travel plus home gate if they have em but worse attended early in the season. The back end losing more on traveling farther for MAC games, and play more non high majors at home/non D1s. That's not exact, but an inference going on relative memory.

My response from the NIU discussion:

...And yet these schools keep running forward, happily. They've all been losing athletics money for years, and it's fine. Athletics is a huge driver of corporate and alumni investment and donation, very worth it. (*does not apply to a handful of schools that overspend and need to pull back on silly spending)

This is an example of a pure clickbait story.

It frames the question in terms of whether basketball is a "profitable sport across the board for all FBS schools", and shows a {shock! horror} graphic that shows that it is not ...

... but anyone with any knowledge of college athletics knows that what "profitable sport" means it is possible to earn substantial profits on it, not that it is a certainty that every school playing will earn profits from it.

Second, the comparison to football profitability is an incomplete profitability measure anyway, because it doesn't show TitleIX compliance costs. Offsetting 85 full rides takes a lot more from the headline profits of football than offsetting 13 full rides takes from the headline profits of basketball.

And the final thing is that this doesn't show the full income earning ability of basketball, because the biggest money maker in basketball is the Tourney, and less than half of the Tourney revenue goes to the schools playing in the tournament. If the Units distributed 80% of the media revenue, similar to the share that football makes from the CFP, those bars would be noticeably higher.

Now, doing that would drive the NCAA into bankruptcy, since the entire NCAA edifice is not carried as an overhead of Football, the biggest money earner in college sports, it's carried as an overhead of basketball, the number two money earner. If the overhead costs of the NCAA were allocated pro-rata on earnings of all sports, that would pull the headline football profitability down and push the headline basketball profitability up.

Akron loses money on football too once you factor in the $4.5 million annual payment on Infocision.

Someone on Akron's board always says that once you get below the OSU, UM of the world college athletics is really just a marketing tool for the University and should be viewed as such. Akron has had a handful or more of nationally televised games this year. I believe 2 on ESPN2. They will have several more as the season progresses. Come MAC tournament local radio stations and newspapers will be giving it even more coverage.

I get schools have to be smarter financially moving forward, but it would cost Akron a lot more than $2 million in advertising to buy that same amount of advertising. That doesn't even get into the alumni and student engagement piece. I feel football and basketball provide enough benefits that they're worth the costs. It's really the other sports that are a drain to the University.

(02-15-2024 10:53 PM)kreed5120 Wrote:  ... I feel football and basketball provide enough benefits that they're worth the costs. It's really the other sports that are a drain to the University.

It's only the sports above the FBS minimums where the cost can be allocated to that sport ... the sports up to the FBS minimums are part of the cost of Football and Basketball.

So Kent State has 8 men sports (since Indoor & Outdoor T&F counts as two sports), FB + MBB + one other men's team sports, where the FBS minimum is 6 men sports, only FB + MBB requirement as men's team sports. So baseball is an added cost, and the incremental cost of fielding indoor as well as outdoor track and field is an added cost, but cross country, outdoor T&F, golf and wrestling are all part of the cost of having an FBS football team.

Kent State has 11 women's sports (since Indoor/Outdoor T&F is 2), 6 women's team sports, where the pro forma minimum is 8 women's sports + WBB + 2 other women's team sports.

Softball can be allocated to the Title IX offset cost of baseball, so there is a surplus of 2 women's sports and 2 women's team sports. However, Kent State's main campus male/female ratio is 38:62, or 1.6 female students per male student, so it probably needs more than the pro forma minimum. It is plausible that only Women's Lax is an additional cost, with the balance of female athletics a cost of fielding an FBS football team. It is also plausible that the reason Kent State added Women's Lax was to cope with Title IX requirements in the face of shifting male/female enrollment ratios.

As far as bearing that cost, Kent State baseball would be alumni / student engagement sport, since while Kent State has rarely made any noise on the national stage, they've often had winning teams on the conference level.

Akron has the minimum six men's sports, plus coed rifle, but four men's team sports ... IIRC, in FBS you can use a coed sport to meet men's minimum but not women's minimums, so when Akron dropped baseball, they were still OK on the men's sports minimums. Soccer is a sport where Akron has made noise on the national stage, as well as being an alumni engagement sport. The baseball program was brought back based on alumni/supporter action and work to find a way to field the team on a budget, so it can be presumed to also be an alumni engagement sport.

But Kent State M&W cross country? Akron women's golf? Those may well be sports that are part of the cost of fielding an FBS football team.

(02-16-2024 12:16 PM)BruceMcF Wrote:  

(02-15-2024 10:53 PM)kreed5120 Wrote:  ... I feel football and basketball provide enough benefits that they're worth the costs. It's really the other sports that are a drain to the University.

It's only the sports above the FBS minimums where the cost can be allocated to that sport ... the sports up to the FBS minimums are part of the cost of Football and Basketball.

So Kent State has 8 men sports (since Indoor & Outdoor T&F counts as two sports), FB + MBB + one other men's team sports, where the FBS minimum is 6 men sports, only FB + MBB requirement as men's team sports. So baseball is an added cost, and the incremental cost of fielding indoor as well as outdoor track and field is an added cost, but cross country, outdoor T&F, golf and wrestling are all part of the cost of having an FBS football team.

Kent State has 11 women's sports (since Indoor/Outdoor T&F is 2), 6 women's team sports, where the pro forma minimum is 8 women's sports + WBB + 2 other women's team sports.

Softball can be allocated to the Title IX offset cost of baseball, so there is a surplus of 2 women's sports and 2 women's team sports. However, Kent State's main campus male/female ratio is 38:62, or 1.6 female students per male student, so it probably needs more than the pro forma minimum. It is plausible that only Women's Lax is an additional cost, with the balance of female athletics a cost of fielding an FBS football team. It is also plausible that the reason Kent State added Women's Lax was to cope with Title IX requirements in the face of shifting male/female enrollment ratios.

As far as bearing that cost, Kent State baseball would be alumni / student engagement sport, since while Kent State has rarely made any noise on the national stage, they've often had winning teams on the conference level.

Akron has the minimum six men's sports, plus coed rifle, but four men's team sports ... IIRC, in FBS you can use a coed sport to meet men's minimum but not women's minimums, so when Akron dropped baseball, they were still OK on the men's sports minimums. Soccer is a sport where Akron has made noise on the national stage, as well as being an alumni engagement sport. The baseball program was brought back based on alumni/supporter action and work to find a way to field the team on a budget, so it can be presumed to also be an alumni engagement sport.

But Kent State M&W cross country? Akron women's golf? Those may well be sports that are part of the cost of fielding an FBS football team.

I don't disagree about title IX forcing the FBS schools to have more women's programs to offset the cost. That said the last I saw they're paying their women's swimming and diving coach something like ~160k. That seems to be hard to justify considering really nobody goes to the swim meets.

(02-15-2024 10:53 PM)kreed5120 Wrote:  Akron loses money on football too once you factor in the $4.5 million annual payment on Infocision.

Someone on Akron's board always says that once you get below the OSU, UM of the world college athletics is really just a marketing tool for the University and should be viewed as such. Akron has had a handful or more of nationally televised games this year. I believe 2 on ESPN2. They will have several more as the season progresses. Come MAC tournament local radio stations and newspapers will be giving it even more coverage.

I get schools have to be smarter financially moving forward, but it would cost Akron a lot more than $2 million in advertising to buy that same amount of advertising. That doesn't even get into the alumni and student engagement piece. I feel football and basketball provide enough benefits that they're worth the costs. It's really the other sports that are a drain to the University.

Very good points, interesting perspective that makes sense.