Cutting Teams could cost more than it will save
By Luke Decock, Raleigh News & Observer
Thursday’s decision to cut four sports may help balance an athletic budget pushed even farther out of whack by the coronavirus pandemic, but is unlikely to save the university at large any money. It could even end up being a net negative for East Carolina the school, if not East Carolina the athletic department.
“The savings that they say they’re getting far, far overstate the actual savings. From the numbers that they’ve presented...swimming almost certainly, I think, makes money. And while tennis doesn’t, the actual cost of having the tennis program on campus is very small”
“Regardless of what we assume, the savings that they say they’re getting far, far overstate the actual savings,” said Andy Schwarz, a sports economist who consults extensively on college athletics. “From the numbers that they’ve presented, based on some potential assumptions about what would happen in the absence of the sports, they could be very wrong.
Based on Schwarz’s analysis of the financial reports ECU submits to the NCAA — an analysis that assumes every athlete leaves when their sport is cut and was paying full tuition (which is not always the case) and that East Carolina isn’t at full enrollment — the two sports could actually generate a profit of as much as $22,000 a year for the university, even after factoring in what they cost the athletic department.
How?
In the case of East Carolina’s swimming teams, the university funded only 23 scholarships for 54 swimmers during the 2018-19 academic year, according to the NCAA financial reports. That means the equivalent of 31 swimmers were essentially paying their own way to East Carolina. The university’s per-student cost is minimal — the dorms are built, classes conducted and meals cooked either way — which means every swimmer paying part of his or her way to ECU is pumping money into the university’s coffers.
That’s especially true if they’re foreign students paying full freight. In the case of swimming, 23 of 48 current athletes have listed hometowns outside the United States.