If you’ve been wondering why some of college football’s premier programs have been pushing so hard to play football this year despite a global pandemic, we have your answer.
According to a Washington University study commissioned by ESPN, if college football isn’t played in 2020, it would cost the Power 5 conferences (ACC, Big 12, Big 10, Pac 10, SEC) in the sport would lose $4 billion.
According to ESPN:
[Patrick] Rishe estimates that the 65 Power 5 schools would collectively lose more than $4 billion in football revenues, with at least $1.2 billion of that due to lost ticket revenue. Each Power 5 school would see at least an average loss of $62 million in football revenue, including at least $18.6 million in football ticket sales, he said.
Rishe’s analysis for ESPN used publicly available data from the 2017 season from the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and the 2018 Equity in Athletics Database from the U.S. Department of Education, along with conservative projections of increases in revenue over the past two years to arrive at 2020 estimates if the U.S. were not in the midst of a pandemic. Rishe’s projected losses are actually conservative; they don’t include potential losses in media revenue, conference distributions, donations and revenues from corporate partnerships.
With 65 member schools, the Power 5 conferences comprise roughly half of the total number of teams that compete at the Division I level.
As Nick Bromberg of Yahoo! points out, it’s not just the schools who would take a financial hit if football were to not be played.
ESPN would take a significant hit if there was no college football season either. The network has a stake in the SEC and ACC Networks, along with the Big 12’s ESPN+ streaming service, and pays billions for college football rights. Its fall programming is largely centered around football games. The network has scrambled to fill programming voids over the last two months amid the coronavirus pandemic and would have to scramble even more if there were no college football games to show starting in September.
The trickle down effect of Power 5 conferences taking a $4 billion hit would be felt across college athletics. Football programs, normally the only sports programs that generate revenue, pay the freight for the swim teams, soccer teams, and other programs at the school. Without that income, many of those other sports would have to shut down.
Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter @themightygwinn
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