quo vadis
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RE: Will Corona Virus be an impetus for D2 and D3 schools to shutter athletics?
(03-25-2020 04:24 PM)johnintx Wrote: (03-25-2020 03:02 PM)quo vadis Wrote: (03-25-2020 02:05 PM)AZcats Wrote: D2 sports can be money makers also. Granted not as much as D3 because of scholarships. Football is a good example. The average D2 football roster size in 2018 was 111 players and the D2 scholarship limit is 36. That leaves about 2/3 of tuition, room & board, and other expenses still has to be covered by the players.
But ... that assumes that the 75 or so other players on the roster came to that school because of football, and would not have come otherwise.
Given that there is little glory involved in D2 football, that seems very unlikely. It makes zero sense to spend tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket to play D2 football. Or D3. The kids on the team likely choose that school for other reasons, and play football because it is ... there.
A few weeks ago, we had someone arguing that there were kids choosing to pay $45,000 a year in tuition at a private school in order to be the 85th guy - maybe the 3rd string right tackle? - on the roster of an NAIA football team. That was one of the biggest laffers around here in quite a while.
AZcats can answer this better than I can, as he has more direct experience with small college football than I do.
Yes, at the D2 level, the lower rungs of the depth charts are filled with players that would normally go to that particular school. They're getting some athletic aid, but not much. They are getting the same financial aid that other students get.
There is a lot of roster turnover. As he mentioned, there is a high roster size, but it's also not unusual for a school to sign 40 or 50 recruits in a class. There is a scholarship limit, but those scholarships can be split. And, very few D2 schools are offering the scholarship limit in football. So, very few players are there on a full ride. You're getting players that are going to be paying for school anyway, and want to keep playing football.
There are recruiting battles for the better players, who have their choice of schools at the same level. Very few players are getting a full athletic scholarship at the D2 level, so the financial aid package comes into play. The better the package you can offer, the more likely you can get that player onto your team, if he likes your school. These are players that are most likely not getting a full ride anywhere, but can still play somewhere.
Funds are limited (these are primarily smaller public schools and small private schools), so it's not a total bidding war. But, if you can get (conservatively) 50 football players to come in that are choosing your school over another one, and they are covering $20,000 each in tuition and fees, that's $1,000,000 into your school's pocket. For a small private school dependent on tuition, every little bit helps. Likewise, for a smaller public school depending on a smaller piece of state funding, every little bit helps. Also, with Title IX, the schools also have to provide the same opportunities for women's athletics, so these schools are offering expanded scholarships and opportunities for female athletes in order to balance out football.
It sounds crazy, but it helps the bottom line of some of these schools, and gives some athletes the chance to play when they don't have the ability to play at the Division I level.
Yes, but that's what I am questioning. I don't think anything but a trivial number of students are actually choosing to go to D2 school X because of football or other sports, thereby bringing their tuition and room and board money to that school, for the purpose of being on a D2 roster**.
The only ones that would seem willing to do that would be the ones getting a scholarship of some kind, because if the school is offering a scholarship they are likely to actually play rather than be #70 on the depth chart, and their costs are being defrayed, but of course then this cuts in to whatever money the school hopes to milk out of them in terms of tuition, etc. For the student-athletes getting no athletic scholarships, the big majority of the kids on a roster of 110 players, it seems pretty obvious that the price of choosing a school because of football is steep and the payoff is basically non-existent, which makes one question if it's happening.
Here's a quote from an NCAA report on D2 revenues and expenses. This is from 2012 but I doubt things have changed much. And before you question the numbers or what they are counting as revenues and expenses, remember that since the NCAA is a collegiate athletics association, all the "bias" in their reporting is in favor of making athletics look as good as possible, not bad:
"The median expenses for institutions sponsoring football in 2011-12 was $5.3 million. For institutions not sponsoring football, the median athletics expense was $4.0 million. The median generated revenues (those revenues that accrue from athletics directly) at football-playing institutions was $624,000. For those without football, the median was $314,000. Thus, the net expense (i.e., total expenses minus generated revenues) to the median football institution was approximately $4.5 million versus $3.6 million at non-football institutions."
Above, you talked about an extra $1 million going in to the school's pocket from having massive football rosters. As I said, I doubt that, but even if so that falls far short of the deficits reported by the NCAA. Yes, it is greater than the $900k gap between football and non-football institutions, but of course football is significantly responsible for costs in other sports because of the need to satisfy title IX.
http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/rese...s-expenses
** That of course doesn't even address the moral issue of using athletics to get student tuition and room/board money, at a time when the public thinks that athletes should be compensated by their universities, not milked as cash cows themselves.
(This post was last modified: 03-26-2020 10:48 AM by quo vadis.)
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