Surviving the cut: researchers posit how big-money sports could mean smaller athletic programs

Economic woes could mean fewer college teams

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Chasing national championships in the costly sports of college football and men’s basketball can mean fewer competitive opportunities for other athletes.

Just ask James Madison athletic director Jeff Bourne. The southwest Virginia school eliminated 10 sports in 2007 to comply with federal Title IX requirements that require equality in male and female sports.

Or David Akinniyi, a three-year starter for Northeastern at defensive end and linebacker before the Boston school dropped football in 2009. Akinniyi transferred to North Carolina State to salvage his final season, but many of his teammates stopped playing.

The pair spoke Wednesday at a University of North Carolina sports research conference. Other panelists and participants at the annual College Sport Research Institute meeting — the largest gathering of academics who study the business of college sports — predicted that the era of broad-based athletic departments is in even more danger as the economy continues to founder.

“It used to be a sport got dropped here and there,” said Michael Moyer, executive director of the National Wrestling Coaches Association. “Now it’s not that unusual for eight or 10 to go out the door.”

With 81 teams, Division I wrestling is half the size of the sport in the mid-70s, Moyer said. Three more programs are on the chopping block: University of California system schools in Bakersfield, Davis and Fullerton.

Yet those numbers are likely the envy of men’s gymnastics, which fields just 16 teams in Division I and a sole squad in Division II.

The days of campus athletics program as a protected class are over, said John Cheslock, a Penn State professor who studies the economics of collegiate athletics.

With double-digit tuition increases, enrollment caps and faculty layoffs common at large public universities, athletics is going to have to share the pain. And instead of across-the-board cuts, that will mean eliminating entire teams, he said.

“They’re going to look at the athletic department to help deal with those deficits,” Cheslock said.

Such conversations are under way in Berkeley, where Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has asked faculty members, athletics officials and boosters to help figure out how to reduce Golden Bear sports’ financial dependence on the university. One faculty member termed the discussions a “come-to-Jesus moment for athletics.”

Bourne called the decision at James Madison to eliminate seven men’s and three women’s sports — from archery and cross country to fencing and gymnastics — “one of the most painful things you can go through” as a campus leader, a decision with nearly as much emotional impact as a student’s death.

The move led to an unsuccessful federal lawsuit filed by a group of 450 athletes, coaches, parents and fans. While James Madison said it was seeking to balance athletic participation by gender, critics suggested that the money lost by supporting a football team exceeded the savings from the eliminated programs.

NCAA research shows that just 25 major college sports programs turned a profit in 2008, the most recent fiscal year for which data is available. Public universities in college football’s top tier reported a median value of $3.31 million in direct annual support from their schools.

Audience member David Ridpath, an assistant professor of sport administration at Ohio, called for cost-cutting athletic departments to focus on the accepted excesses of marquee college sports.

“Do we really need to have 100 kids on a football team?” he asked. “Do we really need charter flights and home hotel nights?”

Not all colleges are faced with what the sport research institute called the “ethics of elimination.” In Divisions II and III, where athletes usually don’t receive scholarships, schools have quickly learned that more sports means a bottom-line boost from more tuition-paying students.

A September 2009 AP review found that colleges in the three NCAA divisions planned to add a total of 174 new teams while dropping just 59 over the ensuing two years.

Moyer said his association has added about 70 schools in the past decade, primarily small colleges. In the past year alone, Arkansas, Georgia and Texas have added the first college wrestling programs in their states.

“The business part of adding a wrestling team is incredibly appealing to any enrollment-conscious school,” he said.