As college leaders make plans for the fall semester, one part of campus life that hangs in the balance — and holds outsize importance for some students and alumni — is the slate of fall sports.
On Friday, Mark Emmert, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, said holding games hinged largely on whether normal campus life would resume. The prospects of that happening are, at best, iffy.
How much money are we saving by cutting this sport, or even postponing or canceling the season, compared to how many students are we going to lose if we do this?
For football, the most visible and lucrative of big-time college sports, athletics departments are preparing for a range of alternatives to the traditional season. It could begin in mid-October or be postponed until the spring of 2021. Teams could play fewer games or split their schedules between the fall and the spring seasons. Games could be played without fans or canceled altogether.
The financial implications of such disruption are likely to be enormous, and — for big-time programs — compounded by the cancellation of the March Madness basketball tournament, the NCAA’s biggest revenue driver. Athletics departments are already announcing multimillion-dollar shortfalls and job cuts. This week, the Florida Institute of Technology announced the elimination of its football program. And on Tuesday, California State University-East Bay announced that its fall season, along with that of all California Collegiate Athletic Association institutions, had been canceled.
But beyond losses shouldered by athletics departments are broader, communitywide effects. Local economies depend, in part, on college-football game days. On smaller campuses, football and other sports draw students, driving enrollment and tuition revenue. And a canceled, shortened, or postponed college-football season could adversely affect enrollment and fund-raising hauls — though such effects could pale in comparison with the coronavirus’s broader impact on campus life.
An Enrollment Driver
The prospect of a canceled football season means different things for different institutions. The revenue loss could be a small shock at a Division I university with a largely self-sustaining athletics department. Smaller institutions playing at the Division II or Division III levels may see the impact in their enrollment numbers.
Recruiting athletes has become a “niche” enrollment driver at Erskine College, a Division II institution in South Carolina. Approximately 700 of the university’s 800 enrolled students next year are athletes, said Mark L. Peeler, Erskine’s director of athletics. The institution is focused on supporting and retaining athletes who had their sports canceled this spring and are hoping for a normal fall season. “Not having a season this year would be devastating,” Peeler said.
Dakota Wesleyan University, in South Dakota, is trying to strike a balance between ensuring student safety and planning its fall athletic season. About half of the university’s students are athletes, which makes it particularly vulnerable to a disrupted fall sports season, said Amy C. Novak, the university’s president.
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Using athletics to attract students is not a new trend, but it has become more central to the recruitment strategy of some small institutions, said Matt Brunet, an associate professor of sport management at Union University, in Tennessee. “They’re adding sports like bowling and bass fishing, in-line skating. Anything to get students to come,” he said.
For the small, often private, institutions that belong to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, colleges are considering ways to retain and recruit athletes even with the prospect of a canceled season, said Jim Carr, president and chief executive of the NAIA, which governs small athletics programs.
“You have to decide: How much money are we saving by cutting this sport, or even postponing or canceling the season, compared to how many students are we going to lose if we do this?” Brunet said.
Recruiting and Alumni Giving
A canceled football season probably won’t directly affect enrollment, but it could have an impact on alumni giving.
While some evidence suggests that a university’s athletic success can spark student interest, “it’s largely a myth that having successful athletics is somehow an enrollment and marketing boon for the university,” said B. David Ridpath, an associate professor of sports business at Ohio University.
However, athletic events such as homecoming can play a role in enticing alumni to give back to alma mater by making them feel connected to the campus, said Steven Rackley, a professor in Rice University’s department of sport management.
A canceled football season will give institutions fewer opportunities to host events that encourage giving, but institutional giving will go on regardless. “It’s not the case that if we don’t have football there won’t be any fund raising done at the university,” said Trevon Logan, an economics professor at Ohio State University.
College Towns
The impact of a canceled, shortened, or postponed season will stretch beyond the university into the local economy.
In Clemson, S.C., local businesses depend on the thousands of fans who fill the stands at Clemson University’s fall football games.
On the weekend of a Tigers football game, the nearly 950 hotel rooms in Clemson are always filled to capacity. Multiplied out across the town’s economy, a football game brings an estimated $2 million to $2.5 million into the town of Clemson alone, said Susan Cohen, president of the Clemson Area Chamber of Commerce.
Commencement and other campus events typically expand tourism, infusing local businesses with cash that lasts through the summer, when the university is not in session. The cancellation of those events has left local stores and restaurants in limbo, as they wait for students to return in the fall and for traditions like football to resume. Another semester online could spell disaster.
“We’re just kind of an anomaly, because we are completely a college town,” Cohen said. “If the students don’t come back, we’re dead in the water.”
At the University of Alabama’s flagship campus, a football weekend can bring in more than $20 million to the Tuscaloosa area. A championship or rivalry game might draw $25 million, said Jim Page, president and chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama.
University of Alabama leaders said they are working toward bringing students back to campus and are optimistic about holding football games, with fans, this fall. The prospect of a different football season had worried local business owners. “The thought of a limited schedule or the football season going away would be devastating to our local economy,” Page said.
In a town like Madison, Wis., the city “basically shuts down” when the University of Wisconsin plays a home game, said Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross, in Massachusetts, who has studied the impact of college football games on local economies. Game days bring thousands of people into the city but typically stifle other economic activity. “There’s a lot of people doing football stuff, but there’s not as many people doing everything else in the economy,” Matheson said. In a pre-Covid-19 world, that limited the economic impact of a game day.
The virus’s economic impact extends far beyond a handful of canceled football games. If football games aren’t being played, it might mean that students haven’t returned to campus and that academics aren’t visiting the city to do research or attend conferences.
“The loss of a couple weekends of football crowds,” Matheson said, “is just going to be a drop in the bucket compared to everything else being shut down at the University of Wisconsin.”
