RE: EMU sports front and center is faculty protest over cuts and layoffs
EMU has transferred $200M from the institution (i.e., tax payer dollar) to Athletics. Students refused to support continuing the student fee. In 2009 the extended fee was not renewed dropping student funding from $8M per year to $1.5M, and three years ago even that $1.5M was not extended by the students. The cuts made today simply keep Football going, and the school subsidy just below $30M annually for the moment.
Revenues from rights run about $3M per year (MAC distributions, ESPN TV money, apparel etc), but ticket sales for all sports, excepting one blip up year, typically run under $250K, while donations fluctuate around $500K.
However Football budget ran $9,033,503 in 2016. An additional $9,497,427 was placed in the category of "not allocated by sport." But comparisons with similar programs without football from a higher cost state even (e.g., Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Northridge, UC Riverside) yielded $4,976,777, $5,025,499 and $4,108,498 was spent by the comparable institutions. Indicating perhaps 45-50% of the "not allocated by sport" money is Football related. Comparing non-Football schools in region (Wright State, Milwaukee, IUPUI) yielded even smaller "not allocated by sport" expenses of $3,859,273, $1,918,254, and $3,140,394, which suggests Football may actually be eating up 2/3rds of the not allocated by sport expenses.
So it appears football's true cost at EMU is somewhere between $13.7M and $15.2M, at least in 2016, but likely higher now. Even if you apply 100% of all ticket sales, donations, and rights/licensing to football it would come up to under $4M (most is $3M in rights or MAC). You can probably add most of the "other" category, which are body bag games to football, which seem to be above $2M, so a rough max revenue of $6M is possible. However this is a serious overestimate. Horizon schools still get about $1M for rights/licensing and that is probably a fair number to guess for EMU, and donations and ticket sales are likely around 50% football specific. That suggests the real football revenue stream is around $4.5M for EMU, almost 90% of that body bag games and MAC TV. This would put the net operating loss of running Football somewhere between $9.2M and $10.7M per year.
Revenue breakdowns from USA Today, Expense breakdowns from DOE Equity in Athletics website.
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Since students refuse to pay even $1 in fees to support athletics, the logical move would be to drop to D-II and drop football altogether. That would probably dry up 90% of the $6M revenue athletics derive, but comparable sized schools in more expensive California in D-II spend only about $5M per year for 20+ sports if they don't have football. That would reduce the athletic budget over $25M per year, and reduce the annual deficit by almost $20M.
If Students are willing to pay a D-I fee of $400 ($200 per semester full time) or roughly $15 a credit unit, then I would say stay D-I and drop Football, to cut the budget in half to maybe $18M range and compete in the Missouri Valley. That would cut the annual deficit by about 2/3rds, and put the institutional transfers under $10M per year, which while higher than I like, would be comparable to most D-I institutions.
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