D-I school profits scarce during 2007-08 season

INDIANAPOLIS – Most of the nation’s college athletics departments are still trying to get out of the red zone.

The NCAA’s latest report on revenues and expenses, released Tuesday, showed that fewer than 25 percent of all Football Bowl Subdivision schools made money in 2007-08, while the remaining 302 schools competing in Division I struggled to break even.

Twenty-five of 119 FBS schools reported overall profits, an increase from 19 in 2006.
The report’s author, Dan Fulks, the faculty representative at Transylvania University, described the results as a basic lesson in college sports’ class system.

“If you’re not selling a bunch of tickets and you don’t have a large alumni-booster base making contributions, and you’re not in the right conference, you have very little chance of showing net positive revenue,” Fulks said in a statement on the NCAA’s Web site.

The NCAA collected data from 2004 through 2008 but did not identify individual schools or teams in the report.

Instead, the governing body identified highs and lows with median and mean numbers. The results are broken into those of Football Bowl Subdivision schools, Football Championship Subdivision schools and those schools that do not play football.

The recession, which began in December 2007, has had an impact on budgets, too.

With declining ticket sales and decreasing donations from alumni and boosters, allocations from states and schools now account for 30 percent of athletic department budgets, up from 20 percent in 2006. Expenditures for athletics from the overall school budgets, however, have remained relatively constant at about 5 percent for the last five years, according to the study.

The greatest expenses are scholarships, salaries and benefits.

Football coaches in the FBS now have a median annual salary of $1.095 million, according to the report. Men’s basketball coaches are making $822,000 while women’s basketball coaches are paid $277,000.

Beyond the cost of scholarships, which are likely to continue increasing because of tuition hikes, and salaries, which are dictated by contracts, Fulks believes schools will seek new ways to cut costs.

“The next place you see beyond scholarships and salaries is in travel, such as busing rather than flying,” he said. “But travel is only about 8 percent of the athletics budget, typically, and cuts there won’t save significant amounts on a larger scale.”

It isn’t high-budget sports that are losing the most money, either.

Of the 119 FBS football teams, 68 – 57.1 percent – finished the year in the black. Of the 119 FBS schools playing men’s basketball, 67 made a profit. But only one of those same 119 schools made money in women’s basketball in 2008.

When broken down by sport, FBS football teams recorded a median net profit of $1.95 million. Men’s basketball at the same schools produced a median profit of $518,000. No other sports program at the FBS schools, when measured by median values, showed a sports program in the black.

Interim NCAA president Jim Isch said the data give college presidents a better idea of where the money in athletic departments is going and how best to make future decisions about funding.

Fulks said winning and losing the financial battles in college sports has more to do with the school and conference than success or failure on the playing surface.

“Schools (making profits) are selling a lot of football tickets, and schools that do are more than likely in conferences that send two teams to BCS bowls every year and six or seven teams to the men’s basketball championship,” Fulks said. “That combination works for about two dozen schools. Otherwise, it’s probably not going to happen.”