Stugray2
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RE: College Athletic Financial Information Database
(07-25-2019 11:46 PM)BruceMcF Wrote: (07-25-2019 10:36 PM)bullet Wrote: Its not at all clear that football helps bring in net $$s to a non-P5 school. For Alabama or Oregon or Michigan, yes it does. For Eastern Michigan, that's an entirely different question.
I doubt that it does ... I think (as is often the case) Kit-Kat is engaging in "optimistic arithmetic" here.
But there's still a kernel of truth here, which is that what the net cost of football buys is the exposure on national TV during #MACtion and the "ESPN Bowl Game Filmed In Front of a Live Audience" games. And if you just look at the gross cost of the FB, you would be massively overstating the net marketing spend, because a larger part of the hard money costs are covered by the CFP and TV money than is commonly understood.
When you look at the savings from dropping a women's team sport, that's mostly travel and coaches salary. After all, in the MAC, a lot of the scholarship costs are only pro forma, since most MAC schools are not up against capacity limits in most majors, and since so much of tuition covers fixed overheads rather than marginal per-student costs. The incremental hard cost of adding another student is therefore typically substantially less than the tuition they would have been charged. In many cases if you have a half-ride scholarship student, they are bringing net revenue into the school when the actual net cost of their education is taken into account. Certainly quarter-ride students are bringing in net revenue, as are walk-ons that would be attending a different University without the opportunity to be a varsity player in this sport. So for a relatively lower cost sport, you can easily have the on-campus operating costs and coaches salaries and a good chunk of travel subsidies paid for by the surplus on tuition from the team members.
If you have a school up against its capacity limits, or a more expensive sport to operate (like ice hockey), that would be less the case, but for soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, track, volleyball, gymnastics, they often don't have a hard cash net cost near as large as the program budget including scholarships would indicate.
EMU Football and other athletics as "exposure" and by that I guess you mean advertising for the school, are a very poor return on the dollar. And remember, excepting Hockey (which is another issue), most of the sports you mention as not cost effective, are for the most part required at a D1 level to meet the requirements of fielding a FBS level football team
So how effective has this "advertising", which is what the $203.4M given by the state tax payer the last years netted in return:
PHP Code:
year Ticket Sales Contributions
2017-18 $776,377 $1,073,330
2016-17 $231,725 $607,580
2015-16 $488,707 $431,502
2014-15 $148,738 $523,811
2013-14 $367,038 $418,086
2012-13 $173,973 $563,830
2011-12 $385,053 $580,610
2010-11 $133,664 $360,426
2009-10 $292,606 $333,955
Total $2,997,881 $4,893,130
That totals just less than $3M in ticket sales and just less than $4.9M in donations over 9 years. (USAToday data)
That is an $7.9M return on a $200.3M investment.
What about enrollment? Well last year there were 12,275 full time undergrads, 7,291 of those women (only 4,984 men). Of course the literature at EMU tries to disguise this:
"2016 Enrolled Students: 21,246 (63% full time)"
That comes to roughly 13,385 students (clever that 63%). I think we can assume that was reasonably accurate for 2016-17. That means for 2018-19 there were 1,110 fewer students, a drop of 8.3% in enrollment. In 2010-11 there were 23,503 students, which if we assume the same 63% comes to 14,807 full time, some 2,532 more than last year, so a drop of 17.2% in the last 8 years.
So this $203.4M in advertising via the MAC has seen a drop in enrollment of at least 17.2% or 2,532 full time students and roughly 4,000 students in all students.
Without football and dropping to D2, the budget should drop to about $4M. Even if ticket sales and donations went to $0, the State would save nearly $20M a year in subsidies.
How many college students could be educated for $20M a year? The math says at least 500 full ride, probably more like 1500 with a directional school like EMich and 30% self funded. This is the lost opportunity cost. It would also lower the cost per student about $800 per year.
As advertising this stinks. A similar result occurs when analyzing schools like Kent State, Ball State and Akron. MACtion has a terrible negative ROI.
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College Athletic Financial Information Database
