Financial Woes of a University Outside the Power Five - UConn Edition

The linked article says that UConn is losing 40 million dollars a year on their athletic department. While we can argue whether the 18 million the athletic department is being charged for scholarships is a real cost the school is still losing substantial money on a cash absis.

UConn AD leaves door open to trimming sports

The school is seemingly pinning its hopes on the AAC getting a better television contract or the Atlantic Coast Conference letting the school into the conference. Is either outcome remotely likely? If UConn dropped football could they gt back into the Big East?

Personally I feel that the problems UConn is having demonstrate that any administrator that approaches the governing body of any university asking for money to upgrade athletic facilities and programs using the rationale that the Power Five Conference will then grant membership should be terminated immediately.

 

It's such a significant issue that most people outside of our field don't see. They just assume that college athletics are an endless flow of money.

Perhaps if it's a Big Ten school getting a $33 million check each year from the BTN (which, while not taxpayer-funded, it essentially is... for anyone who wants cable or satellite).

Especially at UConn, which is one of the few athletic departments that I imagine actually makes money on women's basketball. EDIT: I see UConn lost $3M on Geno's program. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? Men's basketball isn't a surprise as that's becoming a black hole of attendance because the regular season games just don't matter anymore with the emphasis on the tournament.

New Mexico dropped men's soccer (which will affect my son's college list) but may get it back. They usually win 70% of their games but they're in C-USA and all of their road trips are flights out east -- very expensive program to keep up. The trouble for them... hardly any D1 men's programs anywhere close by: Grand Canyon, Denver U, Utah Valley and that's it...

 

As a UConn alumnus and season ticket holder to men's basketball, I would say that this is from a myriad of reasons that come together into a perfect storm. Getting put in the AAC didn't help, but the decisions of the administrators are ultimately at fault here. When the decision was made to go 1-A in football, the university could have expanded its on-campus stadium. At the time, it made sense: Skip Holtz kept improving them in I-AA, they were in the Big East, etc. Instead, the townspeople raised holy hell and the stadium was built 25 miles off campus in 2003. Then, Randy Edsall built it up, made a couple of bowl games, and then it all really started going south once they made the Fiesta Bowl. They lost, I believe, $1M from that game, then Edsall packs up and leaves for Maryland, former AD Jeff Hathaway hires his friend Paul Pasqualoni as the replacement, he gets fired after a few years, whackjob Bob Diaco gets hired and further drives it into the ground, and Edsall is brought back to right the ship, culminating in last year's Dumpster fire (not of Edsall's doing, which I'm sure will get the Maryland fans up in arms). It's no surprise how much they lost last year. Rentschler Field is a mausoleum at this point. Edsall also just took out $150K from his salary to give his offensive coordinator a raise, because I'm sure Edsall is grooming him to be his replacement.

With basketball, I believe the AAC is doing the damage here. Season tickets are way down -- Gampel is at maybe 75 percent capacity for MBB, and about the same for WBB -- but you're just not going to bring in fans to watch Tulsa and Tulane. Plus, former coach Kevin Ollie is suing the university for wrongful termination based on racial bias, so there is another element.

While they are building new facilities on campus for soccer, baseball and hockey, most if not all, of those funds are coming from alumni and donors.

I've said all along that the ACC would be a perfect fit. It's just up to the ACC to open its arms -- if it ever will.

As someone who was there in the mid-to-late 90s, it's a sad situation to think about how good it was then and to see what it is now.

 

I read an article that UConn was getting nine million dollars a year from IMG through 2018. It sounds like those funds were not replaced. Do you know how much the new deal is for?

 

Tulane is on the way up in football -- no small feat -- but basketball still plays in a 2400-seat gym built with the proceeds from the 1931 Rose Bowl. And, Mike Dunleavy simply cannot coach the college game.

 

I have heard some rumblings that UConn is trying to move to the Big East in all sports and move its football program to the independent ranks.

 

Pitt got a winning lottery ticket to the ACC because of UCONN and Boston College. Story I’ve heard is that Swofford was kicking around adding Syracuse and UCONN in 2011 and BC blocked one and not the other since they didn’t want the direct competition from Storrs. So Pitt got the phone call instead and Steve Pederson, shmuck that he is, managed to answer the phone without accidentally dropping it into the toilet.

 

Don't disagree, but what choice do they have? Languish in a far-flung basketball league with no regional rivals and no fan interest to prop up a corpse of a football program that bleeds money?

 

No choice, really. They fucked up big-time when they went all-in on football. Barring time travel, the best they can do is stop the bleeding. It's really sad to see how far the hoops program has fallen.

 

How many people actually pay go to the Tulane football games after you subtract out students and staff who pay a nominal amount?

 

They would be better off dropping football rather than playing as an independent. Even BYU, with a large national fan base, has struggled going that route.