Interesting stat from our AD

[factman]

Yesterday at the Falcon Club luncheon, Bob Moossbrugger said that if we SOLD OUT, every game of our revenue sports, it would only increase our athletic department budget $2-2.5 million, and move us up from 12th to 11th in the league as far as budgets are concerned. Now you know how important those "payday" football games are, and the need for private $$$, corporate sponsorships, etc!

[falcon83]

If those numbers are true, we should just do away with all sports. Nobody really cares about them now and after they are gone, they won't be missed. Why waste any more money on something that only a few people care about? Hell, even our athletes don't seem to care in most sports!

[Flipper]

Ohio State generates $54 million per year from ticket sales in revenue sports..

The Big 12 is screwed..only a matter of time before Texas and Oklahoma wise up and join the B1G. Eventually you'll have four 16 team "Power" leagues playing for those four playoff slots. The rest of us will be relegated to the margins permanently.

Dropping sports is not the answer....I'm not entirely sure what is.

[hammb]

Ohio State generates $54 million per year from ticket sales in revenue sports..

The Big 12 is screwed..only a matter of time before Texas and Oklahoma wise up and join the B1G. Eventually you'll have four 16 team "Power" leagues playing for those four playoff slots. The rest of us will be relegated to the margins permanently.

Dropping sports is not the answer....I'm not entirely sure what is.

That Big12 thing is coming sooner rather than later, IMO. Texas & OU will move on to the Big10 or SEC...and you'll have 4.

I still see think LONG term those leagues will start to weed out some of their lesser members as well. Getting down to 4 leagues makes perfect sense for the big powerhouses, but the next logical step is to start cutting off the crap schools from the teats. The Vanderbilts, Rutgers, Marylands, etc. They don't bring anything to the revenue table for those big leagues, and they are getting an equal cut of bowl & TV payouts. Sure the OSU, Alabama, etc are rolling in the dough, but I think eventually they'll get even greedier and want more. I don't know who they'll play, but they'll find a way to still play and keep a larger portion of the bucks, I'm sure that's the eventual path.

As for us? For starters we have no business pretending to play Division 1A football anymore. I don't know if there is a cost/benefit ratio to playing a lower division brand of the sport or not. But being in the MAC and paying what we are is a massive cost sink that provides comparatively little in revenue.

Outside of football, I bet if you committed to the other sports you could be competitive and make the budget work out. Even though basketball is a big time money maker for some schools the nature of the sport (along with the 1 & dones) keeps it viable at MAC level. The biggest hurdle we face there is so many of the non-football conferences have jumped up to fill our niche in the sport because we kept throwing dollars hand over fist at the behemoth that has become D1A football. 20 years ago the MAC was an awesome hoops conference. Unfortunately, we've ignored the sport for most of that time funneling money into football only to see the Butlers, Gonzagas, etc rise up and fill the niche of powerful hoops programs from not powerful conferences. The MAC screwed up big time.

Hockey is hockey. It probably costs a lot of money, but as long as we're competitive our fan following is pretty good. They probably have a better balance sheet than most sports here do.

The other sports are simply about giving them enough money to compete, and hopefully bring some value to the university. You're never going to balance the budget with revenues from baseball, golf, track, etc, but you can hopefully get school spirit on the investment, and if you're not spending all of your time trying to make football work on a shoestring, you might luck into a lot more quality at the non-revenue sports.

[apollo]

How can BGSU have the worst budget in the MAC and have a hockey program? The university needs to either put more money in athletics or cut some sports. What's the point of having all these teams if you're just going to suck at them? Just eliminate what you can and put the money into the remaining teams.

[footballguy51]

How can BGSU have the worst budget in the MAC and have a hockey program? The university needs to either put more money in athletics or cut some sports. What's the point of having all these teams if you're just going to suck at them? Just eliminate what you can and put the money into the remaining teams.

Let's start with the baseball team. They bring absolutely no money into the department.

[Flipper]

Is fielding a baseball team baseball a requirement for MAC membership?

[Schadenfreude]

Is fielding a baseball team baseball a requirement for MAC membership?

Nope. Akron just eliminated baseball.

In the Big Ten, Wisconsin hasn't fielded a baseball team since the early 1990s.

I agree with FootballGuy. If we ever need to eliminate a sport, baseball should be eliminated first.

[apollo]

How can BGSU have the worst budget in the MAC and have a hockey program? The university needs to either put more money in athletics or cut some sports. What's the point of having all these teams if you're just going to suck at them? Just eliminate what you can and put the money into the remaining teams.

Let's start with the baseball team. They bring absolutely no money into the department.

Okay...mind as well cut Baseball if you're going to continue to underfund them. Once again, not sure why you'd cut one of the 2 or 3 sports that actually has won championships recently? But if you're not going to cut FB, Hockey, BBall or VB then everything else can be looked at.

[hammb]

Is fielding a baseball team baseball a requirement for MAC membership?

Used to be that Football, M/W hoops, baseball, and softball were the MAC requirements. I don't know that those requirements are still in existence though.

I don't really believe that cutting all of the minor sports, which would leave us with Hoops, Football, and Hockey moves the needle all that much. I haven't looked at the sport by sport budget breakdown lately, but it seems like that would be akin to cutting NASA funding to balance the federal budget.

No doubt that baseball, softball, tennis, soccer, golf, etc are all underfunded to compete while also not bringing in any revenues. But are they costing us enough to even be more than a blip in the budgets of football, hoops, and hockey?

[Flipper]

Hoops is cheap...football and hockey are not at all cheap. Non revenue sports are nada...do they even add up to 50 full time grants?

We need to form the sanity football conference. 35 full rides plus 25 that you can split any way you like. HC capped at $250K. OC/DC capped at 125 2 FT assts capped at 75 each and 2 GA's.

[apollo]

Is fielding a baseball team baseball a requirement for MAC membership?

Nope. Akron just eliminated baseball.

In the Big Ten, Wisconsin hasn't fielded a baseball team since the early 1990s.

I agree with FootballGuy. If we ever need to eliminate a sport, baseball should be eliminated first.

Just for the record....Akron's president was fired last spring for how he handled the university's cuts and the elimination of the baseball program.
Wisconsin will likely be sponsoring a baseball team in the next 3-5 years. Things have been in the works for the past 6 months or so to bring it back including an endorsement from Bud Selig. It's the only Spring sport that really anyone follows....with the exception of a couple schools that have Lacrosse.

[footballguy51]

Hoops is cheap...football and hockey are not at all cheap. Non revenue sports are nada...do they even add up to 50 full time grants?

We need to form the sanity football conference. 35 full rides plus 25 that you can split any way you like. HC capped at $250K. OC/DC capped at 125 2 FT assts capped at 75 each and 2 GA's.

Scholarships for football are regulated by the NCAA. Partial scholarships cannot be given. Some sports can have partials; most of these are the non-revenue sports here at BGSU. The ones that cannot have partial scholarships are football, men's and women's basketball, women's tennis, women's volleyball, and women's gymnastics. I believe ice hockey also is restricted to full scholarships, but don't quote me on that.

As for cutting baseball, it's a joke. People complain that if we funded baseball to a full amount then we'd be great at everything once again. Clearly they are baseball fans and simply wish to troll every other sport. So, the only appropriate response is to declare that baseball should be cut, therefore annoying them greatly and, in effect, trolling the troll.

Membership in Division 1 requires us to maintain 14 sports (7/7 or 6/8 for men/women), and to have a sport of each gender representing each playing season. We currently field 18 sports (7 male, 11 female) with 228 male participants and 234 female participants. So, as much as we like to joke, we couldn't cut baseball, football, hockey, or anything like that without replacing it with another male sport. Likewise, our membership in the MAC requires us to sponsor a certain set of sports (football is one of those).

Realistically, we could only cut football if we wanted to lose Division 1 status completely. We would then have to add a men's sport (like swimming & diving or track & field) and then eliminate some women's sports for Title IX compliance. We could always move down to FCS and potentially save some money on expenses, but also lose significant money on our buy games (top-tier FBS programs won't pay huge money to play FCS teams like they do to play mid-major FBS programs).

This is not as easy as everybody claims it is. If it were, we'd be able to do the AD job.

[Flipper]

Who says we have to be part of the NCAA?

[Schadenfreude]

So, as much as we like to joke, we couldn't cut baseball, football, hockey, or anything like that without replacing it with another male sport.

I'm not joking. It certainly doesn't help BGSU for us to be here on a message board speculating on which sport we ought to cut, if any. I'm certain Danny Schmitz doesn't appreciate a thread like this. But if Apollo is going to run down every revenue sport we have, I don't see the point in holding back. I've long thought that if we need to cut a sport to save money, we should cut baseball.

I'm not sure I follow why we couldn't do this.

We have 18 sports, more than the NCAA requires for Division I. So 17 wouldn't be a problem, would it?

We already have a men's spring sport: Golf. Isn't that enough?

And I don't see how eliminating baseball would hurt hurt us with Title IX. If anything, wouldn't it help? My impression has always been that the scholarships we offer are a bit male heavy, when compared to the composition of the student body, and that eliminating a sport like baseball would bring us closer to where we ought to be for Title IX.