RandBall: Where’s the money? Gophers budget shortfall raises questions

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stocker08 said:
How many major D1 schools have no women's basketball program? My guess is that the number is close to zero. This isn't an issue unique to Minnesota. My guess is that the conference is already looking at ways to better monetize women's basketball through media deals. And with growing interest in the sport, who knows what things will look like in five or ten years.
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It’s an interesting discussion on the growth of the sport. WNBA numbers are way up when Clark plays, little more lagging when not. despite that, they still lost 40-50 million in 2024 despite a tiny fraction of revenue sharing to the players compared to the other major sports.

They’ve also had the luxury of putting their season to not compete and basically be the only thing on espn right now. WNCAA will not have that luxury as they’ll go h2h against basically all other sports running concurrently, which is going to hurt their overall tv deals. Same reason why men’s hockey will always lag as you can watch the pros and you’re competing with the NBA and MBB at the exact same time.

The problem with NCAA sports is they’re all just trying to make money and have entered a stupid level of arms race with each other in paying coaches, trainers, admins, compliance officers, and so on plus travel has gotten completely out of control that your expenses make it near impossible to balance the budget for everything that’s not fb and mbb (which only budget balance due to tv). The faster they go to a cba with a salary cap and revenue share the easier this is going to be for institutions. Right now ADs are caught between fans demanding success and not breaking the bank in a fashion that’s not sustainable for the long haul in many sports
 



hello-world said:
Yes, unfortunately I cannot direct link to their reports because of the way the web application works, but you can access them here: https://ope.ed.gov/athletics/#/.

Navigate to University of Minnesota - Twin Cities first and you will see what a true report looks like. It will show you revenue and expenses by team under "Revenues and Expenses".

Minnesota, to its credit, also publishes its full NCAA membership financials every year and you can access them here: https://gophersports.com/sports/2018/5/21/ot-financial-reports-html

Then navigate to Rutgers - NB and you will see what a doctored report looks like. It reports revenues versus expenses as exactly equal to each other.

Now you might say, maybe they manage to that. But you'd be wrong. Because Rutgers got sued and had to publish their actual financials one year: https://rutgersaaup.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Rutgers-report-to-the-NCAA-2021.pdf

In which they show the true amount of money that their women's basketball team is losing.

Purdue is slightly different in that they doctor it to show women's athletics overall as a wash, rather than every individual program (also laughable).

It is astonishing to me that Trump hasn't gone after this, and I'm not even a Trump supporter, but whatever.
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Thank you for your detailed reply. I would think the B1G would mandate every school report the same way, except maybe the private schools (NU and USC).
 



stocker08 said:
How many major D1 schools have no women's basketball program? My guess is that the number is close to zero. This isn't an issue unique to Minnesota. My guess is that the conference is already looking at ways to better monetize women's basketball through media deals. And with growing interest in the sport, who knows what things will look like in five or ten years.
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You're right, and I'm not arguing that there's a world in which they will cut WBB. I'm just saying that it would save the most money.
 
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Added a chart of where the Gophers Athletic budget comes from and goes to and how that breaks out by sport. The punchline is that a) They were doing a very good job of managing things before this new $20M expense came into play, and b) Gopher Football is what creates money for the rest of these programs and the U needs to do everything it can to grow that source of revenue. Nothing else is going to move the needle.

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WAGopher said:
Thank you for your detailed reply. I would think the B1G would mandate every school report the same way, except maybe the private schools (NU and USC).
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The NCAA mandates it, but they don't make those reports publicly accessible. Technically, you could force every public university to disclose them by requesting them, and there's a foundation that does that (https://knightnewhousedata.org/), but I have not found a way to split out men's / women's profitability numbers from their data.
 

WAGopher said:
Then why can’t we compete in the pay 4 play NIL?

This is the first year in a while I feel underwhelmed by our recruiting.
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because either Bob has decided not to use it or Coyle/DTA have decided to not allocate it (or people haven't earmarked it for hockey).
 



hello-world said:
You're right, and I'm not arguing that there's a world in which they will cut WBB. I'm just saying that it would save the most money.
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True. It'll be interesting to see how everything shakes out in a few years when all the profit sharing models are implemented and tweaked.
 


GopherGod said:
Yep for all the undeserved accolades John Anderson got from the locals, he never took a team to Omaha. Most schools would not allow a coach to last for almost 40 years without achieving that of a major conference program. And as underwhelming as he was the program is trending even lower now. Time to just shut it down, the university clearly doesnt care about the program and neither does the fanbase.
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You're telling me Hoiberg would be fired if Nebraska basketball couldn't make it past the Sweet 16 even though he is making the NCAA tourney every other year, winning the Big Ten every 4-5 years, and winning Big Ten coach of the year every 4-5 years? While winning 60% of his conference games?
 

GophersInIowa said:
You're telling me Hoiberg would be fired if Nebraska basketball couldn't make it past the Sweet 16 even though he is making the NCAA tourney every other year, winning the Big Ten every 4-5 years, and winning Big Ten coach of the year every 4-5 years? While winning 60% of his conference games?
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I think people who say that overrate big ten baseball before the recent additions
 



Some guy said:
I think people who say that overrate big ten baseball before the recent additions
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Yeah the Big Ten was not a top conference in baseball for most of Anderson's career. Still isn't but certainly better with the additions.
 


GophersInIowa said:
Yeah the Big Ten was not a top conference in baseball for most of Anderson's career. Still isn't but certainly better with the additions.
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Just my thought is not making the CWS as a big ten team isn’t unique to MN

One team has made the final since like 1970

The original big 10 (11) have made CWS appearances:
Indiana - 1 - 2013
Iowa - 1 - 1972
Michigan - 8 - most recent 2019 (and the only team to make the final)
Michigan State - 1 - 1954
Minnesota - 5 - 1977 most recent
Ohio state - 4 - 1967 most recent
Penn State - 5 - 1973 most recent
Wisconsin - 1 - 1950

So not including expansion teams since 2012ish, the gophers are 3rd most recent to college World Series
 

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