RE: G5 Debt Mounting
To back up quo vadis, there has been an explosion of deficit spending in the AAC, especially by Houston, Cincy and UConn (yikes!)
At Uconn the loss of the Big East power status has been devastating, as media revenues have dropped while the school has binged to be the only G5 budget ahead of ANY P5 budgets (49 among the 52 reporting public P5 schools). Transfers from the Institution (tax payer education dollars) has exploded from $6m in 2010 and $6.3m in 2011 to $17.3m in 2014, $17.9m in 2015, $27m in 2016 and $33.9m in 2017.Donations run about 40% of a power conference and gate is less than half. Worse the majority of both donations and gate are from Basketball, making the P5 chase dubious.
At Houston a calculated decision seems to have been made 11 years ago and jumped support from $2.3m to the $17.6m the last few years (it's a step to a flat level). Again gate and donations are only about 1/3rd or 1/4th of most P5 schools. (They do have $8m in student fees helping). It just doesn't look like a P5 school, and $160m in education dollar transfers the last decade is massive (it could have funded a new department with 1,000 students; UConn is worse 2,000 student slots could be paid for with the current transfer rate).
Cincinnati is has now been running at over $25m a year transferred the last four years.
A typical P5 runs $15-25m in athletic donations. No AAC or MWC school is close to that, most are in the $4-8m range.
Note, the schools with larger donations and student fees, such as Bowling Green, Old Dominion, South Florida (they have also trimmed spending) Central Florida, Ohio, FIU, and East Carolina (they appear topped out, with small donation and gate, but large student fees ... my guess is their attendance is mostly "free" students and locals paying next to nothing -- they lack the ability to generate P5 gate and donations) are in better shape to sustain.
As a whole in 2017-18 the 57 public G5 schools (not counting the academies) claimed $2,141,854,714 in revenue ($37,576,398 per school), but 33.4% ($724,296,312 or $12,706,953 per school) of that was transferred from the parent Institution. That is a huge drain of money. But worse this is more than triple what it was a decade ago. This is an additional 1/2 Billion dollars to subsidize G5 compared to 10 years ago. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money.
(This post was last modified: 07-01-2018 06:48 PM by Stugray2.)
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