A few weeks ago, Stanford cut nine Olympic sports from its 36-team varsity program, saying the pandemic forced it to make hard budget cuts.
Last week, the University of Iowa announced it was cutting men’s gymnastics, men’s tennis and men’s and women’s swimming, saying the athletic department this year would lose about $100 million in revenue and would be operating at a loss of $60 to $75 million. In a note of irony, the $69 million Campus Recreation and Wellness Center, which opened in 2010, and which the school put some $5 million into just last summer for repairs, is due to stage the 2021 men’s NCAA championships.
Iowa is the first Power Five school to cut its swim and dive program amid the crisis. Five other Division I schools, according to the website SwimSwam, have already announced cuts: Boise State (women’s), UConn (men), Dartmouth (both), East Carolina (both), Western Illinois (both).
The University of Iowa pool — so nice, and for what? // photo from University of Iowa // Kun Zhang, Dimension Images
Nebraska on Friday announced that 51 athletic department staffers will be furloughed from Sept. 1 through the end of the year. Athletic director Bill Moos said earlier, “We are now looking at a deficit in athletics alone … of north of $100 million. If we can get the television revenue or parts of it, with a non-traditional (spring) season, that will help. But each home football game is worth $12 million, and that didn’t count television and our media partners and all those things … Now we have a solid feel for the dilemma we’re facing … that is a daunting exercise.”
This is just the beginning.
In life, as in sport, as in pandemics, the problem we’ve got is elemental — we don’t know when this ends.
To use the football analogy, the goalposts keep moving.
More football (the American kind). Football is king. Without football, financially the whole thing falls apart.
The Big Ten and Pac-12 have announced they aren’t playing fall football; as Moos said, spring games are allegedly being studied, but how? The SEC, ACC and Big 12 say they intend to play this fall but, again, how? Men’s college basketball depends on the financial goldmine that is March Madness; it was canceled last March; it’s difficult right now to see how it gets played next spring.
Oh — the Olympics are off; whether they’re on next July is anyone’s guess.
The world of sport as we know it is turned absolutely upside down.
It’s understandable that Iowa swim alums, just to take one, feel blindsided and aggrieved. And we can all feel considerable empathy for the young men and women who under normal circumstances would be doing laps in Iowa City whose hopes and dreams have been derailed — and for the alums of a proud program, their memories now taken to a corner they never could have foreseen.
But here’s the thing.
The pandemic has forced a reckoning that is long overdue.
Nothing in our world comes for free. Nothing.
For years, Michael Phelps — not an Iowa alum, let’s be clear — made it plain every which way that his goal was to grow the sport of swimming in the United States. Now that he is the greatest-ever, without question, he has made it plain that his new focus is mental health.
Both commendable pursuits.
All the same — someone paid Michael so he could concentrate to be the best, Michael is still getting paid to be Michael (Michael deserves every penny he’s paid) and if someone wants to pay for mental-health support, step right up and do so.
The question is — who’s gonna pay for what, and why?
If we in the United States want to fund Olympic-style sports, the question has to be — why?
For what purpose?
To win?
To win — what? Participation trophies? Age-championship blue and red ribbons? Big Ten titles? Olympic medals?
Or is the goal the health and well-being of our young people?
If that’s the case, what metrics are we using — or should we use — to measure the value proposition? What’s the ROI?
It’s pretty clear what the value proposition at Iowa and elsewhere is.
That is 100 percent what the pandemic has made plain.
For a very long time now, at a great many places, football has been the financial engine that keeps the train moving down the tracks.
But the warning signs of looming trouble are everywhere.
In June, Under Armour pulled out of sponsor deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with UCLA and Cal-Berkeley. The UCLA deal was purportedly worth $280 million over 15 years, the Berkeley arrangement $86 million over 10.
The termination with UCLA came after that school’s sports department reported an $18.9 million deficit during the 2018-19 school year, which as the Financial Times reported, underscored the financial challenges facing even the biggest schools before the pandemic.
Harvard —which, as the student newspaper, the Crimson, notes — boasts the most varsity athletics programs, 42, among the roughly 350 colleges and universities that make up the NCAA, with some 1,200 students on a varsity Harvard team, has already incurred more than $30 million in unpredicted expenses and lost revenue and is staring at a department deficit for fiscal year 2020.
In a quote that sums up everything, athletic director Robert L. Scalise told the Crimson, “It’s unrealistic to think that we’re going to be able to operate the way we did in the past.”
The Big Ten schools — I have had a lifelong association with Northwestern — have a lucrative deal with the Big Ten network. That network is based on content. Right now, there is no content. Or, rather, how long can you watch re-runs of 2014 wrestling dual meets?
The points here should be obvious.
College football funds the system that in the United States produces Olympic athletes. Without college football, that system is in systemic peril.
Without Olympic Games, the entire financial underpinning of that system — broadcast revenue, in particular — is suspect.
The IOC likes to say that it has reserves enough for it — emphasis, it — to survive.
But what about all the other pieces of the so-called Olympic family?
FIFA, the international soccer federation, will survive. It is worth billions.
FINA, the international swim federation, will come out the other side. It has sizable liquid and physical assets.
A federation such as FIE, the world fencing federation, will make it, too. That’s what happens when you are underwritten by a Russian oligarch.
The IJF, the judo federation, will emerge. Its president, Marius Vizer, is shrewd and nimble.
The others? Just to focus on the 28 existing Summer Games sports — here’s a guess that 20 of the 28 might not make it without their Olympic subsidy.
It’s not unthinkable that a stalwart federation such as World Athletics, formerly the IAAF, may find itself in untenable financial straits. The sport has a considerable European base; a patron in Prince Albert of Monaco; but, according to a June 5, 2020, report in The Sports Examiner examining 2018 IAAF finances, the federation had “less than one year’s revenue in reserves.”
Then there is the USOPC and the 50 U.S. national governing bodies. In this country, there is no federal Olympic ministry, no federal funding mechanism for Olympic sports.
The USOPC said earlier this year it was eliminating 51 positions and furloughing 33 more in a bid to trim up to 20 percent of its budget – its staff of about 500 reduced by about one-fifth.
As bleak as the situation is and would be for the USOPC, as chief executive Sarah Hirshland has indicated it would be, it would almost surely be far worse for the vast majority of NGBs.
USA Track & Field would seem to be smartly positioned because of the business acumen of chief executive Max Siegel, who since 2012 has grown federation revenue from $17 to $37 million and in 2014 shrewdly signed a long-term deal with Nike estimated to be worth $500 million.
No one, however, is immune.
Just four years after Phelps’ final swim in Rio, USA Swimming — which together with USA Track & FIeld produces roughly two-thirds of the medals for the American team at a Summer Games — took out a (purportedly one-time only) government loan to help get through the pandemic. (USATF did not.)
The others?
How does USA Handball go forward? USA Badminton? USA Pentathlon?
What is their value proposition?
When surveys and anecdotal evidence alike make plain that what turns young people on is esports, that’s a hard but serious question. But it needs to be asked, all the more so amid this pandemic.
Not just — should these sports be on the Olympic program? Though of course that is the starting question.
But then there is the follow-up — how should the system in the United States fund programs that produce athletes in these, and other minor, sports?
And if so — why? Perhaps it’s too blunt to ask, what’s the point? So let’s frame it a little differently: what’s the purpose?