OT: OSU Athletics Budget Cuts

Story by Matt Brown at Extra Points, excerpts/highlights below:

Ohio State led the country in athletic department operating expenses in FY23, with $274,948,554. It also led the country in reported revenues ($279,549,337). The department sponsors a whopping 36 teams, plays in a football stadium that seats over 100,000 screaming fans, and expects to compete for national titles in multiple sports.

This quote from Carter, via the Columbus Dispatch, is illuminating:

Carter told The Dispatch in an interview last week that athletics has been self-sustaining for more than a decade and that the university does not want to use taxpayer dollars or tuition dollars to support all of the teams in the future.
"We'll still have scholarships, we'll still have programs," Carter said. "Some of those sports may start to look and act a little bit more like a club sport, but yet compete at the Division I level and still travel and still compete."

Carter's argument here lines up with what I've heard not just from other folks around Ohio State, but from ADs and senior leaders from the P4 to the low-majors. It's time to figure out how to tier your sports, and figure out where you want to go all in, and where you want to offer what is essentially a D-III experience with D-I brands and facilities.

I don't know what the downstream implications of some of these decisions will be
Let's take men's volleyball, for example. That's a relatively niche sport, only sponsored by 28 schools. Ohio State is one of those schools, and is regularly in national championship contention. Let's say, hypothetically, that Ohio State elects to significantly decrease their scholarship and annual budget for the sport, in order to better invest elsewhere in the department, and the school is no longer a title contender.
If you're say, Grand Canyon, or Irvine, or Northridge...do you take Ohio State's retreat as a sign that a national title in men's volleyball is more possible, and double your own investment? Would the retreat of programs like Ohio State or Penn State make a national title in men's volleyball less meaningful and worthy of investment? Would it even remain an NCAA sport?

These were the excerpts I found most interesting, but the piece also discusses how the House v NCAA ruling is driving this, and the Title IX impact. Brown also discusses how non-rev sports will likely leave major conferences and be more regionally focused.

Anyways, fascinating read.