Mike Brey keeps his pencil close, his adding machine on and his options open these days.
As if the coronavirus pandemic hasn’t already brought enough anxiety to colleges and universities through canceled events and campus closings, the financial squeeze Notre Dame and everyone else expects to feel in the coming months and years is another challenge administrators and the Irish head basketball coach already face with no immediate solution.
The cancellation of the 2020 men’s and women’s basketball NCAA Tournaments will reportedly bring about a 63-percent revenue reduction to each school from what they expected to pull from the direct distribution fund in 2020.
USA Today first reported that the cancellation of March Madness shrunk the profit pie from about $600 million to $225 million for schools to share.
Brey said that this financial blow — likely to be the first of others to come — brought a budgetary warning from Notre Dame vice president and director of athletics Jack Swarbrick.
“What athletic directors from all over the country are thoroughly worried about is how deeply is this [pandemic] going to impact finances and how we can be better stewards of the budget,” Brey said. “We don’t have any perfect answers yet.”
For Brey, he expects the first notable financial challenge for his program to come this summer during the construction of his 2020-21 pre-conference schedule.
Power Five teams routinely fill their non-conference slates with “guarantee” or “buy” games to build a portfolio for their season-ticket packages and presumably stockpile some sure wins.
Notre Dame schedules about eight such guarantee games each season, at an estimated cost of $90,000 per, for a total expenditure of about $720,000.
“Do we start to play more home-and-home series and not buy as many games?” Brey suggested of replacing the pricy one-and-done option with a reciprocal two-game approach that carries no cost to either school beyond travel. “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 [Swarbrick] has said to all the coaches in every department that this [pandemic] is greatly going to affect our budget.”
And even Brey admits that most of the real-time budgetary projections and conversations still presume the lucrative fall sports season will remain fully intact and go on as scheduled — aspirational hopes that shrink as COVID-19 spreads.
College football weekends are the financial lifeline for athletic programs throughout the country, especially at schools such as Notre Dame which covers much of its secondary (Olympic) sports budget from football revenue.
A recent study published by Forbes found that in the three years from 2016-18, Notre Dame ranked fourth in the country in football-driven profits at $76 million.
The ripple effect of losing an entire or even a partial football season would leave athletic departments around the country running on financial fumes.
“I’m trying to stay positive, but I wouldn’t rule anything out at this point,” Brey said. “I’d like to get my guys back in June for summer school, but maybe it’s not until Labor Day, maybe it’s after that.
“Does college basketball not even start until Jan. 1? I’m thinking all of these things through. We gotta be prepared for everything.”
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