Great article from the spectrum dropped the other day. Which talked about the impact of the covid pandemic on the finances of college athletics and in particular UB.
Because the NCAA draws so much money from March Madness, and it didn’t happen the NCAA Board of Governors are only going to send $225 million to Division-I member schools instead of the expected 600 million.
While that’s a 62.5% decrease overall the impact of THAT revenue stream for UB will not be back breaking. Overall in 2018-2019 Buffalo’s athletic department got only about 3.8% of their total revenues from the NCAA’s disbursement.
The two big hits that UB is expected to take would be from the partial reimbursement of student fees (amount still unknown) and the possible impact of state budget cuts from the economic turndown created by the shelter in place order put in by the state to flatten the infection curve so emergency services can keep up.
The state assistance made up almost half of UB’s revenues last year a large cut there can mean dire things for the department. The last time there were cuts, and they were modest cuts, several sports were cut by then UB Athletic Director Allen Greene.
The requirement for FBS membership is that a school participates in conference play in at least six men’s and eight women’s sports. That’s exactly where UB is, so there is nothing that can be cut if Buffalo wishes to stay an FBS school...
Unless perhaps the NCAA starts granting waivers because this is going to hit a lot of schools very hard.
There are a lot of unanswered questions right now, because we have no idea how bad or how long this is going to last.
The Spectrum has an interview with Alnutt, linked above...