Cal dumping baseball

Interesting. I thought football was a money drain on an athletic department.

That's what all the Title IX advocates say.

 

That chart makes absolutely no sense. Cal football earned only $75K profit in 2008? Baseball had only 13 players? Golf lost $97.40?

 

First Rosebud, now this...

 

They may have only had 13 receiving scholarship money. Though that doesn't make sense because it says Cal had 115 athletes but only 85 can receive scholarships. And men's basketball lists 15 and I think the scholly max is 12. That is puzzling.

 

I doubt all of those on crew and a few other sports are all on scholarship.

 

Football and men's basketball are always the ones that make money. It's why all the others are called nonrevenue sports. There may be exceptions, but I don't think there are many.

 

Cal baseball was a fully-funded program, 27 on scholarship.

The Bears, like UCLA (until last season) were always a mystery, so much talent in the state and so much to attract athletes to each campus, but not much results.

Fullerton, Long Beach and even Cal Poly were/are better baseball schools, because somebody there actually cared about the program. Cal's baseball facilities were an embarrassment for a Pac-10 school.

 

I wouldn't put a whole lot of stock in this chart. When you add up the numbers, it shows a net loss of $495,000 for 2008. The cited shortfall for 2010 was $12 million to the entire department. Assuming the individual sports' numbers are somewhat similar from year to year, that's 96 percent of the shortfall that is not reflected in this "evidence." Even allowing for the cases where deficits doubled or tripled between '07 and '08 and assuming that path continued, this is murky at best. A whole lot of creative accounting and interpretation.

And the ultimate point, that Title IX and women's basketball are the root of all the problems, is perfectly valid. However, tell it to the Supreme Court, because that law is not going anywhere.

 

How can golf only lose $97, or even $470? I would think every dollar invested into golf, or any of the other low- or no-spectator sports would be impossible to recoup.

And holy shit, what did womens softball, volleyball and basketball do to double or nearly triple their rate of loss between those two years? The economy and gas prices, I guess, but it still seems like a lot.

 

Sucked?

 

I did this story over a decade ago and at the time, there were six women's hoops teams, four women's volleyball teams, and one women's soccer team that turned a profit. That number has since gone up on women's hoops, but only by a few.

 

Lol. Just seemed a pretty drastic drop. I mean, unless they're perennial NCAA top contenders, how much can on-field performance really effect the women's softball attendance?