Interesting article on adding sports during the pandemic...

[Maroon Eagle]

At the start of the pandemic, lots of colleges cut varsity sports teams, trying to save money.But a few schools did the opposite and wound up better off. They understood that some "non-revenue sports" aren't that at all.My latest at @GlobalSportMtrs https://t.co/q9ia88s8PZ— Leander Schaerlaeckens (@LeanderAlphabet) March 11, 2022

From that article linked in the above tweet:

‘The Athletic Director Doesn’t See the Revenue’

Andy Schwarz, an economist and expert on college sports finances who has consulted with FDU, doesn’t use the term “non-revenue sports.” Instead, he uses “tuition-revenue sports.” It’s an apt moniker, one that acknowledges that most college programs are actually glorified enrollment tools. The overwhelming majority of Division I – let alone Division II or Division III – sports programs don’t make money in the way that you think of sports programs making money: via gargantuan television contracts or merchandise sales. But they make money nonetheless.


The idea that they somehow don’t is sometimes used to justify NCAA amateurism. Allow men’s basketball and football players to be paid, the argument goes, and there won’t be enough money left over for schools to cover the costs of all the supposed money-losing sports – which will then have to be cut.


Schwarz says that this simply isn’t true, especially not for the vast majority of schools fighting to recruit students. “It’s really important to think about opportunity cost here,” he says. “Stanford University [as a whole] is not making money on its tuition-revenue sports. It’s not bringing a body on campus that it wouldn’t otherwise bring onto campus. A person on a 10 percent field hockey scholarship is taking the place of a person who might be paying full price. But a person at Fairleigh Dickinson who is on a 10 percent field hockey scholarship might be replacing an empty bed, so there’s no opportunity cost there.”

 

[johnson86-1]

At the start of the pandemic, lots of colleges cut varsity sports teams, trying to save money.But a few schools did the opposite and wound up better off. They understood that some "non-revenue sports" aren't that at all.My latest at @GlobalSportMtrs https://t.co/q9ia88s8PZ— Leander Schaerlaeckens (@LeanderAlphabet) March 11, 2022

From that article linked in the above tweet:

That seems like it makes a lot of sense for expensive schools. Not sure any of it translates to a school like MSU. Even if we are filling the roster with people getting 20% scholarship off out of state tuition, that still works out to just under $20k per athlete. Have to have a pretty big roster to cover the costs of a single coach and equipment. So using the example of men's volleyball with 3.5 scholarships and 18 roster spots (so essentially just under 20% per athlete), that's $360k of tuition revenue. That would cover the $350k of costs of the men's volleyball program in the article, but doesn't really move the needle. But have just two in state players out of 18, and it turns into a money loser. (And that is assuming that the marginal cost to the university of adding 18 more students is zero).

Still interesting to think about whether we could add some DI sports very inexpensively and come close to breaking even.