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(05-19-2020 09:19 AM)Bearcat 1985 Wrote:  I have a feeling that we truly won't know how this all ends up for at least another year. A lot of this is being done under the cover of COVID. In other words, universities with deeply financially unstable athletic departments are all of a sudden using COVID to do things that they were staring down in any event. Even then, it seems to be a cut here, a cut there try and protect football and basketball as much as possible and see where things stand in a few month.

Regardless of how quickly we come out of the pandemic, I think this has opened up the pandora's box of unsustainable college athletics, and the bloodletting has only begun. And I don't think anyone's immune. The G5 are clearly the canaries in the coal mine, but what happens when the 60 or 70 million dollars in football ticket revenue that Michigan or OSU count on to fund their 30+ D1 goes away for a year?

Then they'll realize that spending a couple hundred thousand dollars to support a ******* rifle team or water polo is a stupid idea.

Truthfully, all of the revenue anchors should just end up being what Michigan did with their "Varsity Club" sports...that's the way to go for the future. Allows for marginal oversight and recognition of the teams without adherence to NCAA parameters or the need to dump money into them. It also allowed for many club sports to become self-sufficient through gifts they otherwise would not have been able to develop because of the promotional power and support of the athletics department.