When University of Maryland President Wallace D. Loh recently announced the termination of eight existing varsity athletic programs, it stunned athletes, program supporters and made great copy for the local news media. Indeed, I feel for the athletes, coaches and parents of members of the Terps’ indoor track and field, outdoor track and field, cross-country; men’s and women’s swimming and diving; men’s tennis; women’s water polo; and aerobics and tumbling teams. At least the University of Maryland has the class to honor their scholarships and the coach’s contracts. At least the University of Maryland is trying to stop the bleeding. Football is, of course, a blood sport.

The cuts at Maryland, however, are but a harbinger of things to come and some that have already come to pass. While supporters of the eliminated varsity programs scurry to find alternative sources of revenue to fund their teams, one enormous, unbiased, thoroughly researched report that both addressed the financial issues facing major college athletics and predicted cuts like those at Maryland, looms large: The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, co-chaired by U MD Chancellor William Kirwan, and producer of a voluminous but extremely relevant report.

The most salient point of the Knight Commission: “Neither enhanced media contracts nor a football playoff can solve the systemic financial problems facing athletic programs. Serious, sensible fiscal reform will.” 

Conventional wisdom always pointed to football and, to a lesser extent, men’s basketball, as revenue generators that financed the entirety of unprofitable men’s and women’s varsity sports at Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) schools. The Knight Commission Report (KCR), released in early 2010, pointedly reveals this to be fantasy for most FBS schools. According to the KCR, of 120 FBS schools, “only 20-30 athletics programs actually generate enough external revenue to cover operating expenses.” So unless your school is among the football elite in an elite football conference, at least some portion of your school’s athletic funding comes from the school’s general fund. The general fund relies on state money for part of its revenue. Of course, state support has slipped with the economy while costs for all sports programs have risen. We are through the looking glass, people.

The University of Maryland may play in an elite football conference but decades of mostly poor teams have hurt revenue generation. The expansion of (formerly) Byrd Stadium a chimera predicated on elusive success on the field. Woops. At least the Terps get a share of the ACC Conference Football Revenue. If an FBS team plays in the Mid America Conference (MAC), its share of conference football revenue comes from a much smaller pot. No wonder teams are scrambling to gain entrance into a handful of “superconferences.”

But there is another problem with the whole “superconference” craze, simple geography. While gaining admittance to an expanded SEC or ACC or BIGWHATEVER gives your football team a piece of a bigger conference revenue pie and, if the team is good, even more revenue from conference title games and bowl tie-ins, what happens when other varsity sports have to travel 2,000 miles to play a conference game? Yes, yes the superconferences will be divided roughly into geographically oriented divisions, but that does not preclude interdivisional play.

 

In the end your football team, unless of year-in, year-out top 15 caliber and from an elite conference, still won’t generate enough revenue to cover other varsity sports whose travel budgets have now skyrocketed due to the superconferences huge geographical reach. 

In an Op-Ed piece in the ‘New York Times,’ Murray Sperber, author of ‘Beer and Circus: How Big-time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education,’ opines, “The guiding principal [in conference alignments] should be geography, not only because it builds natural rivalries…but it [also] addresses a major problem in college sports: almost every intercollegiate athletic department loses money, including those of the major powers-and, according to even the NCAA, the red ink increases every year.”

The problems pointed to in the KCR were already manifesting themselves at places like Rutgers University, where six varsity sports were cut after the 2006-2007 school year. At the University of California (Berkley), varsity baseball with more than a 100-year tradition, was axed last year.

Just last month, the only Division I varsity sport at University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH), men’s hockey, was essentially killed by University of Alabama higher-ups in Tuscaloosa. The UAH hockey team had a 33-year tradition and represented the only top flight varsity men’s hockey program in the Deep South. The University of Alabama Tuscaloosa is one of the few FBS schools whose athletics department should be, relatively, flush with cash due to a football team that may well be better than the Redskins. Nonetheless, when it came to an expensive varsity sport at one of its “satellite” schools, AD Mal Moore and all the powers that be behind the scenes (these folks make Yale’s Skull and Bonesers look bush league) happily cut some fat elsewhere.

Conference USA was the original geographic superconference, but without the star power that the new model ACC, SEC and Lord knows what else may have. Presently, Conference USA (CUSA) teams include East Carolina (at one geographic extreme) and the University of Texas El Paso (at the other). CUSA was notable this season for having the last Non-BCS Conference undefeated football team in the nation in the University of Houston, until they were crushed by Southern Miss in the CUSA Championship Game. But Houston is moving to the…Big East?

Yes CUSA is big, but not BIG like the proposed NEW Big East. With its premier football programs jumping ship (West Virginia seemingly the latest of these) the Big East is on the cusp of adding Houston and SMU as all-sport members and Boise State, Air Force and Brigham Young as football-only members. The East is getting really, really big. Texas big. Honestly, I really don’t follow the specifics of all the conference jumping. It serves only to confuse me and make me feel old. 

Ultimately, all the money a school loses on intercollegiate athletics is compensated by higher tuition, room and board fees. I offer no panacea, nor does the KCR. I love college football but, in this story, it’s one of the bad guys. The proliferation of superconferences should exacerbate problems, and pretty quickly. By the way, where is the NCAA in all this?  So keen to enforce miniscule infractions by student athletes, the NCAA seems impotent as the landcsape of college athletics is altered in ways that defy both logic and long-term stability. When you see Rutgers’ women’s volleyball team in an airport en route to a match at SMU, you’ll know the end is at hand.

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