Jerry Sullivan can’t Math

So Jerry Sullivan put out a real dumpster fire of an article today. I was going to rip off one of my point by point rebuttals but he is all over the place. So rather than point by point I will go topic by topic.

Topic number one: Jerry Sullivan can’t math.

I’m going here first because the cuts to the department are about the budget, hence numbers, hence math.

First lets see what he had to say...

Buffalo fans need to feel connected to something bigger, and MAC football doesn't qualify. That's a shame, but it's a reality. The university pours one-quarter of the athletics budget ($7.53 million) into football and gets little bang for it. Vinny DiVirgilio, a UB soccer player, wasn't far off when he called it a "bottomless pit."

...

I've come around to the position of my colleague Bucky Gleason, who has been arguing for years that UB should abandon FBS football and drop to the FCS, where so many schools compete. He believes UB should seek a better basketball league and let hoops be the dominant program, the way it is at Villanova and so many other colleges.

Ok, I guess I gotta do this again.

If UB drops to FCS here is where they save or gain money

• 44 dropped scholarships (22 men and 22 women) - This would save the department roughly one million dollars (1,200,000) in scholarship money.
• One sport would get dropped - 22 womens scholarships would mean the end to a sport. That would save about 150-200 thousand dollars .
• NCAA Hoops units, if UB gets into the A10 they would get an extra 488,000 dollars in NCAA revenues because the A10 is a multi bid conference.

Now let’s look at the other side of the ledger

• FBS Payout - MAC Members got 1.16 Million in 2016, CAA Members got 225,000 per school. That’s a net loss of 935,000
• Television Contract - MAC members get 670,000 a year, CAA members get nothing and A10 members get 350,000. So going to the A10 means losing 320,000 a year in TV revenue
• Football Payday games - UB and most mid major FBS schools get seven figures from their payday games (Penn State, Minnesota, Kansas State). FCS members get between 250-500K. So that’s a loss of 750K per year in payout games.

Ok Jerry here is the math.

1,200,000 + 200,000 + 488,000 - 935,000 - 320,000 - 750,000 = -117,000

Dropping to FCS would cost UB more than 100,000 dollars a year.