College ADs Facing Doomsday Scenario if Football is Canceled
Clemson coach Dabo Swinney can have "zero doubt" that the college season will start on time this fall, as he was quoted as saying last week. But the reality of the coronavirus pandemic that has brought all sports around the world to a screeching halt is that nobody has any idea when it will subside enough for the games to begin again.
And whether Swinney wants to admit it or not, it's not just the start of the season that's in doubt.
There is a real possibility that there might not be any college football in 2020.
It's an unprecidented challenge the likes of which no one, including NC State athletic director Boo Corrigan, has ever encountered.
Not even Corrigan's father Gene, who served as both ACC commissioner and NCAA president during his Hall of Fame career, would have had a playbook for how to handle such an uncertain situation.
“My dad had to deal with a lot of different things,” Boo Corrigan told Pat Forde of SI.com. “But he never had a pandemic.”
So what might happen if the NCAA's primary cash cow joins the NCAA basketball tournament, College World Series and so many other major events as a casualty of COVID-19?
It's a subject about which Corrigan and other administators would prefer not to consider.
But because they're already bracing for the worst and formulating contingency plans just in case, Forde asked a dozen prominent ADs and industry experts about how a cancellation of the football season might change the landscape of college athletics as a whole.
And it's not a pretty picture.
"I don't know what we've named it," Clemson AD Dan Radakovich told Forde, referring to a committee he's formed to investigate the school's options in the event of a cancellation, "because I don’t have an acronym for doom.”
Another Power 5 administrator, who for obvious reasons asked for anonymity, put it even more bluntly.
We’re all effed,” the athletic director said. “There’s no other way to look at this, is there?”
Click here to see Forde's captivating story on the subject.
Beyond the obvious repricussions of a shortened or canceled football season, the financial impact would represent a serious -- if not fatal -- blow to many other college sports.
“Football allows us to have these other sports," Radakovich said. "It’s a big amount.”
How big?
According to self-reported financial documents examined by Forde and SI, Power 5 public universities made an average of $28.2 million in profit last year on football. In the ACC, football programs made an average of $15.9 million, while the average basketball school pulled in $6.1 million.
A survey of college football revenues by FootballScoop.com showed that State brought in $46 million for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2019. That figure ranks fourth in the ACC behind only Florida State, Clemson and Miami.
Basketball, on the other hand, brought in just under $15 million in 2018.
Corrigan danced around the subject of dollars and cents last month when asked by SI All Wolfpack about the potential financial hit State could take as a result of the coronavirus shutdown, especially if it affects football.
"I think we've got to figure out the balance of this academic year, where we're going to be in summer school and just continue to look down the road as we continue to stretch out," he said. "There's factors on both sides of the ledger.
"There's factors on the revenue side -- refunds for baseball and softball tickets that were sold, the ACC tournament, NCAA money on that side of it. But on the other side there's travel that we planned on doing that we're not doing now. There are some other things we had in the hopper that we were looking to do that we're not going to do because at the end of this, we really need to be really, really fiscally responsible."
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