Assessing Financial Implications For Notre Dame After Spring Sports Ruling
In the span of about two days in March, college sports went from operating as normal to halted entirely. And, as it turns out, halted for a while.
The NCAA Tournament was swiftly canceled. Spring sports and their championship events soon followed suit.
Careers halted. Careers ended. Teams forced apart without any send-offs.
But the NCAA sent spring sport seniors a message with a massive ruling: The stadium will still be lit for them, hurdles still lined up on the track, and white lines still painted if they want to step back between them one more time when next season arrives.
The NCAA Division I Council announced Monday that all members of spring sports teams will get an extra year of eligibility, while winter athletes whose seasons were cut short during or right before postseason play will not be granted an extra year.
Scholarship limits were expanded to account for incoming freshmen and seniors or graduate students who come back for one more season. Baseball’s roster limit was also lifted.
It’s a commendable gesture by the NCAA to look out for the players’ careers and well-being, which sounds great when written in a press release. Giving athletes who lost nearly all their seasons due to something out of their control another year is the sensible call.
There will, though, be difficult decisions for schools, coaches and players to make and potentially awkward conversations to have. The financial undertaking of adding a year of eligibility for everyone is a massive consideration. For some schools, it’s possibly severe enough to make welcoming all seniors back an impossible task.
With that in mind, the NCAA said as part of the ruling that schools will not be required to pay returning seniors the same amount of athletic scholarship money they were given for the 2019-20 academic year. A senior who was on a half-scholarship could be invited back for next season on a quarter-scholarship or even no scholarship. The rule does not apply to athletes who were already eligible for 2021.
“For the seniors, it’s definitely a tough situation because a few of them already had jobs lined up, but they want to play another year since they have it,” said Spencer Myers, Notre Dame’s starting center fielder. “It's a tough decision for a lot of people.”
Examining Costs
Most spring sports are equivalency sports, where rosters are larger than the total number of scholarships allotted for the sport. (Non-athletic aid often comes in play to help for athletes on partial scholarships). Baseball, for example, has 11.7 scholarships to split among a maximum of 27 players. The roster can have as many as 35 players, though that was lifted for 2021.
“The Council’s decision gives individual schools the flexibility to make decisions at a campus level,” council chair and Penn athletics director M. Grace Calhoun said in a statement. “The Board of Governors encouraged conferences and schools to take action in the best interest of student-athletes and their communities, and now schools have the opportunity to do that.”
In the ruling, the council said schools can use the NCAA’s Student Assistance Fund to pay for scholarships for athletes who opt to return. Ordinarily, the SAF used is for helping athletes fund smaller costs they couldn’t afford, like a flight home for a family emergency.
As a private institution, Notre Dame’s annual submissions to the NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System are not available through public records. Those submissions would indicate the total number of athletes on scholarship and their costs.
However, some basic estimates can paint a picture of the expenses. Based on scholarship limits per sport, Notre Dame has 122.9 athletic scholarships available for its 11 spring teams (baseball, men’s and women’s golf, men’s and women’s lacrosse, rowing, softball, men’s and women’s tennis, men’s and women’s track and field). The estimated cost of tuition, room and board, and meals and supplies (scholarships cover those) at Notre Dame for 2020-21 is nearly $75,000. With 122.9 scholarships used, the total estimated scholarship expenditures for spring sports next year would be $9.14 million.
That figure does not account for seniors who choose to return. This year, those 11 teams had 85 combined seniors. It’s not known how many were given athletic aid.
A spring scholarship budget of $9.14 million is much more than even a large public school like Indiana or fellow ACC member North Carolina State, for example. Every Division I school, public or private, has the same athletic scholarship limits for a given sport. Do private schools want to saddle their balance sheets with additional scholarship expenses? Will they be able to? The uncertainty around it was expressed by many even before the ruling.
“There are so many questions with what this will look like,” Notre Dame softball coach Deanna Gumpf told BlueandGold.com before a decision was made. “I want this entire team to get an extra year because they all lost one, but is that realistic? There is so much to work through.”
The unease of adding more scholarships is heightened with the coronavirus still threatening to diminish or wipe out future revenues, chief among them football money that often funds entire sports’ expenses. A disruption of football revenue would send another tidal wave through budgets across the country.
The cancelation of the NCAA Tournament due to the virus already caused a 63 percent decline in revenue distribution. Initially projected at $600 million, the NCAA will instead distribute $225 million to its 353 Division I basketball members.
“There has to be some kind of re-correction of some of the financial commitments and some of the financial input into the industry,” Northwestern athletics director Jim Phillips, whose son Luke runs for Notre Dame’s track team, said in an interview on a Chicago radio station. “To what level, that’s what we’re trying to determine.”
In one case, Iowa State athletics director Jamie Pollard has already announced his program’s coaches will take a pay cut and have bonuses frozen for the rest of the year, a move he said will save $3 million. Elsewhere, Wyoming athletics director Tom Burman said he is reducing his salary by 10 percent each month through the end of the year.
Notre Dame men’s basketball head coach Mike Brey said the typical structure of his non-conference schedule — eight guarantee games against mid- and low-major teams — is likely to change. Notre Dame usually pays the opponent $90,000, equaling a $720,000 commitment per season. Those could be replaced by home-and-home series with better teams, which do not require a check.
“Do we start to play more home-and-home series and not buy as many games?” Brey told BlueandGold.com. “And are these home-and-homes, are they bus rides if they are road games?
“Those are all things that we have been talking about. I’m conscious of this and [Notre Dame athletics director Jack Swarbrick] has said to all the coaches in every department that this is greatly going to affect our budget.”
Notre Dame, though, will feel a lesser impact than smaller schools or institutions that do not have football. A Forbes study found that Notre Dame ranked fourth nationally in football-driven profit from 2016-18, at $76 million.
Still, the financial impacts of the NCAA’s decision and the coronavirus will leave no one unscathed. The University of Wisconsin is reportedly anticipating up to $100 million in losses because of the pandemic. That figure is more than 3 percent of its annual budget.
Winter sport athletes, while deprived of a postseason in some cases, had completed their regular seasons or entire season. The idea of giving seniors another year was a long shot. Most coaches understood that it was not possible and illogical, Brey among them.
“Selfishly, can we get Johnny Mooney back for another year, of course, I’d sign up for that,” Brey said. “But I just don’t think that’s right and I think most coaches feel the same way.”
Decisions To Make
Notre Dame’s baseball team had eight players who were in their final year of eligibility before the NCAA gave them another one. They need to decide if they want to come back. Notre Dame’s coaching staff and administration has to decide if it can afford to give them the same financial aid package as before.
None of the eight are full-time starters. One of them, Eric Gilgenbach, is a fifth-year graduate student who has an MBA.
“He’s definitely able to go get a good job,” said Myers, a junior with his own MLB Draft decision to make. “I’d definitely love to have him for one more year and I know the rest of the team would.”
Myers said he does not know of any concrete or final decisions his senior teammates have made, but he understands the factors at hand on the players’ and coaches’ sides.
“A lot of guys have had interviews and could definitely enter the work force next year if that’s what they wanted to do,” Myers said. “Guys like Ethan Copeland, [Anthony] Holubecki, [Andrew] Belcik. I think Danny Jung is set on playing another year from what I remember him saying. A lot of guys that are going to have to make that tough decision to see if they want to come back or if they just want to get their lives started outside of baseball.”
Andrew Mentock and Todd Burlage contributed to this story.
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