The University of California announced this week that after the 2011 season, it would be cutting baseball, men’s and women’s gymnastics, and women’s lacrosse as a result of university-wide budget cuts, leaving coaches and support staff without jobs and student athletes without their sports. While at first glance it may not seem like California’s budget cuts have much to do with the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), but upon a closer look the two become very clearly related.
The University of California has been backed into a corner regarding the budget cuts; after years of tuition and student fee hikes in the California state university system, there is no more room to increase these costs. Past hikes have resulted in protests and students are tired of them; this leaves the university with only one other choice: find places in the budget to make cuts.
Financing university sports with the income generated from student fees is a widely practiced allocation of funds by schools nationwide; USA Today reports that $828 million in student fees went toward supporting athletic programs during the 2008-09 academic year. At the University of California in particular, students paid $2.2 million in fees that went towards athletics for the 2007-08 academic year; these fees were increase to $3.2 million for 2008-09.
The University of California had to find a way to cut costs by $4 million a year; the school’s football stadium renovation is currently underway, costing an estimated $320 million, and with so many resources allocated to this project, cutting other major programs such as baseball and other sports was the only way to do this. Baseball alone costs around $1 million a year to operate.
The BCS plays a huge, but often unconsidered, role in these financial constraints facing colleges and universities today.
As a result of the presence and prestige of bowl games, the college football regular season has become much more important in the eyes of university officials than it might otherwise be without the BCS. Because of this, university officials allocate a majority of resources to the schools’ football programs, hoping the team makes it to a bowl game. However, all the expenses associated with these bowl games strip schools of the income they receive from the teams’ appearances. According to the book Death to the BCS, payouts from last year’s bowls totaled $220 but after extreme travel costs and other bowl-related expenses of $80 million, Football Bowl Subdivision schools were left with profits of only $140 million. Many schools often don’t receive a profit at all because their bowl expenses are so high.
As a result, many believe that a true playoff system would be better for football, as well as for all other sports. Experts calculate that a true playoff system would result in gross revenues of $750 million for FBS schools, nearly five times higher than the amounts they are seeing today. This huge increase in revenues would also assist colleges and universities with their ever-increasing operating costs and help to prevent the further elimination of university athletic programs.
