When you really stop and think about it, no sport -- nay, no aspect of American life -- is as exposed to the side effects of the coronavirus outbreak quite like college football.
For starters, we're talking about a multi-billion dollar industry in the same way that the NFL is an industry of its own, or commercial air travel, or fast food, or telecommunications. College students playing football is an economic product that generates billions of dollars for schools through television product, ticket sales, sponsorships, hot dog sales, and a million other revenue streams that are in danger of drying up like it's high noon in a Sahara desert summer. And that doesn't count the offshoot industries like college-town bars and hotels that counting on making their nut on home game Saturdays, or media that cover the sport, or all the Olympic sports that depend on football revenue to fund their budgets.
We're talking about billions of dollars vanished and jobs lost if the sport is not played, and we're already beginning to see the consequences now.
At the same time, we're talking about a sport played by unemployed students.
This is not the NBA and it's not the NFL, where you can float fever-dream fantasies of taking over Las Vegas or building your own company town in middle-of-nowhere Nebraska.
This is a sport played by over a hundred teams at the highest level and close to a thousand from top to bottom. It's played in 49 states, in cities as varied as this country has to offer. And while all sports are designed to be played in front of fans, in no sport are the 70, 80, 100,000 fans in the stands as central to the experience as the players on the field quite like college football.
No sport other than college basketball has as much diversity, but college football requires dozens of players to pack into a locker room day after day, week after week. Football was literally designed to rebuke the idea of social distancing.
All this leads to a level of exposure unmatched by any entertainment offering in American culture.
And, again, this is a sport played by unpaid students. How fair is it to football players to return to campus and play a sport when the tuba player, the cheerleader, the philosophy major are not in the stadium, but back home taking classes on their laptop? How responsible is it, from a liability perspective?
One rule of thumb that has emerged over the past few weeks is that college football can't return until the students do. “With school not in session, I don’t believe it is practical or proper to have intercollegiate athletics,” Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich told Yahoo Sports this week. “Much like we are experiencing on campus right now.”
That unwritten rule creates a situation where one school can hold an enitre conference, an entire sport hostage. Ohio State announced this week shut down all in-person classes through the summer session, which extends into August. How can Ohio State hold football practices in July if the campus is closed? And if Ohio State can't practice, can anyone else in the Big Ten? In college football?
These decisions will not be made by coaches, and in many cases not even by ADs. These are university president decisions. These are governor decisions. These are state health department, CDC decisions. And each level up you go from the athletics department, the less they care about funding the football team's budget.
And yet, a skipped football season is an extinction-level event for many college athletics departments, and certainly many teams within those departments. It's as if the coronavirus was specifically engineered in a lab to exploit every weak point in the college athletics economic model, to point out exactly how the college sports industry is a castle built on quicksand.
It's taken a couple weeks, but ADs are just beginning to wrap their arms around the challenges and the stakes at play.
A survey of 111 Division I ADs administered by Teamworks and LEAD1 showed that 70 percent of respondents planned to lose up to 20 percent of their projected budgets, and more than a third are bracing for shortfalls of 30 percent or greater. More than 55 percent do not have sufficient savings to tide them over, much like the NCAA itself. These are people that would have started sweating bullets had you told them to slash 10 percent off their budgets just two months ago.
And all of this is before they factor in a lost football season. As one FBS AD told Stadium: “If there’s no season, we will be f*****.” From the Associated Press:
“We often hear from ADs and MMR (multi-media rights) sellers that around 85% of revenue comes from football,” said Matt Balvanz, senior vice president for analytics for Navigate, a sports marketing consulting firm.
He said the average Power Five school makes around $120 million in revenue per year, “which means roughly $100 million per year from football.”
For the average Power Five team, a home game is worth $14 million, including its value from a television rights deals, which is over 10% of average total revenue, Balvanz said.
“Larger departments can likely absorb a 10% loss, but if that increases to 20% and 30% with more games lost then that could be a major issue,” he said.
Add it all up it becomes clear that football has to happen, in some shape or form.
In a survey separate from the Teamworks/LEAD1 effort, Stadium polled ADs for potential work-arounds in the event a 12-game, Labor Day-to-December becomes unfeasible.
One idea: beginning in October or November, taking some sort of a holiday break, then resuming in the spring semester. “If we have to delay the start of the season, we could split it between two semesters,” a Power Five AD said. “Some bowls may not occur because of this, but we could play a full season, a majority of the bowls and the playoffs."
Another idea: punt on the fall altogether, and play the entire season in the spring. The bowl season could be in May, and the season could end in Miami in a Memorial Day extravaganza.
This would admittedly open multiple cans of worms. How would the recruiting calendar change if the season was pushed back? Would the NFL draft remain in April? If the season ended in May, could players recover in time to get the sport back on schedule just three months later?
“Would that be the preferred situation?” an AD asked. “Absolutely not, but the lights have to be kept on somehow.”
A less radical idea that would lead to devastating consequences for schools lower on the food chain would be keeping the season in the fall, pushing training camp back a month or so, and playing a 9-game, conference-games only season. This would crush budgets of Group of 5 and FCS programs who depend on 7-figure checks from their Power 5 brethren, and it would take years to untangle all the lost non-conference games such as Texas at LSU, Ohio State at Oregon, Michigan at Washington and dozens of others.
No contingency plan is perfect, all carry unintended consequences, and some of them carry a bigger burden for the programs that can shoulder it the least. But the sport's leaders have no other choice but to find a way to play the season, and the time may come where they're forced to choose the least-bad option on the table.