(04-01-2020 09:15 AM)ken d Wrote:  If the 2020 football season were to be canceled, how much of P5 schools' athletic spending would actually be eliminated? Travel expenses, certainly. Some recruiting expenses, but not all. Game day costs for home games. Some field maintenance costs. Coaches' bonuses, probably.

What won't be curtailed? Coaches salaries and scholarship costs. Sports information staff salaries, probably.

A big question mark for me has to do with the few schools at the very top of the revenue pyramid. If you are a school like Texas, with annual revenues in the neighborhood of $200 million, how many people does your athletics department employ? Are some of them employed just because UT has to spend the money somewhere? If there were no revenues generated primarily from football, including some that aren't attributed to the football program for public reporting purposes, how many of those employees would be furloughed?

How much would uncertainty about the restart of basketball at some point in the next school year play into these tough decisions?

I wouldn't get too wound around the chord on this one. States and Universities will probably take the hit for a year. But I don't see a good reason to worry past that. It may become standard procedure for all players in the future for all travel sports to merely take Hydroxychloroquine and Zinc. As we understand the process now of how it is working. When taken in concert the two together destroy the virus's ability to replicate leaving the bodies immune system to do its work without being overwhelmed. So I see no reason why by next year sports should still remain cancelled.

The greater issue is going to be the social memory of the disease and the ease with which it spread. When malaria was a huge issue for Europeans traveling abroad a culture grew up around the taking of Quinine. The Gin and tonic grew out of this common cultural experience.

But getting people back into desiring to return to malaria prone regions never quite did regain momentum. Returning to tailgating and crowded venues probably won't be as appealing to those whose lives have been negatively impacted by this experience, particularly those who lost loved ones because of it.

It will make many familiar with taking classes online and make them more likely to find other benefits in it.

Our campuses will flourish with online enrollment but the local realtors may not. Room & board costs mom and dad more than tuition in many cases. Future college students may opt to keep their home time high school job and sweetheart and get their degree remotely. They may travel to campuses for some testing and for lab requirements, but the main campuses will likely gravitate toward graduate work, which face it has far less partying and a lot more serious work than undergraduate. And because of that less health risk overall.

I think what we will see is a paradigm shift in how the young look at the college experience. If anything this may facilitate the rapidity in movement to smaller stadium capacity with more private rooms for viewing games than retention of row seating. TV may more quickly become the favorite way to experience gameday. Small social gatherings at homes with HD and surround sound will replace both the need for tickets and the tailgate. It will still be a social activity just not a mass social activity. Team clothing etc will remain popular and bookstores as we've known them will require far less brick and mortar space and will ship to fill orders like Amazon. Shopping online will be improved and become more familiar and grocery stores may finally realize that the way of the future is to return to 1920's when they took orders in the morning, filled them, and the customers picked them up on the way home, or they were delivered.

In any event some industries will be born and others will die as a result of this experience, but the games will go on if for no other reason than TV otherwise is a fearmongering, unhinged, immoral, Harpy in the den of our homes.