Will COVID-19 be the needle that finally bursts the sports bubble?

How the hell much can synchronized swimming cost Stanford if they already have a pool?
This is like cutting an agate clerk and your outdoors writer. It really doesn't do shit for your bottom line.

 

Their most recent EADA report had 11 participants and "operating expenses" of $51,000. That largely means travel. And that strikes me as a very small amount. I'm not sure there's a way to figure out the total cost of the program, but I agree it can't be that much.
It looks like they whacked the stupid things that shouldn't be sports in the first place. By that, I mean sports that don't compete for NCAA-sponsored championships and don't have much participation nationally. There's going to be angst under any circumstance. I suspect the angst would be even greater if they whacked men's volleyball, winner of two NCAA titles, along with wrestling and field hockey but kept synchronized swimming, known exclusively for the tremendous mockery by Martin Short et al on SNL years ago.

 

Their 2020 schedule were trips to Massachusetts, Florida and Arizona twice for 13 girls on the roster and two coaches for I'm guessing no more than 12 days.

But the question, which I can't seem to find an answer for, is how many are on scholarship / partial scholarship to help balance Title IX. If they all get something, then you're talking probably half a million total when you throw in coaching salaries and anything else.

 

Just a guess: If synchronized swimming was one of 25 sports instead of one of 36 before the Trumpandemic began, I'm not sure you'd whack it and only it. I think you do this because if you must purge, you can't be left with a department that still includes synchronized swimming but bids adieu to legitimate programs in NCAA championship-sponsored sports like field hockey, wrestling and men's volleyball.

 

If they only had 25 sports instead of 36, then they probably wouldn't be making the cuts in the first place.

 

The most recent numbers I could find for most teams was from 2015-16, so they could have changed a lot since then. But the top D-I schools then were:

40 - Harvard University
36 - Stanford University
Princeton University
Brown University
35 - Ohio State University
Cornell University
33 - Yale University
Dartmouth College
31 - University of Pennsylvania
Sacred Heart University

Navy is the only other D-I on that list with at least 30. There's only six schools -- Columbia, Boston College, Cal, Michigan, Army and Air Force -- between 26-30.

So as of four years ago, only five Power 5 schools were offering more than 25 sports.

 

Right. Nobody needs ≥ 30 sports. I'll give the service academies a pass. After all those men and women go through in military and academic training, they deserve something resembling fun in their lives.

 

They also have a requirement that every cadet must play a sport. Not all of them are on varsity teams (I know of one local kid who satisfied the requirement by being on the orienteering club team), but having 30-plus offerings might be the only way to make sure 4,000 or so people have the opportunity to do something.

 

Did not know that. Strikes me as a good requirement for many reasons.

 

Orienteering isn’t a sport for them. It’s training.

 

One side effect for Stanford could be their stranglehold on the Director’s Cup.

 

I think there is a requirement that if you want to play D-I football or basketball you need at least eight men's and women's sports,. The idea behind the rule is the NCAA does not want schools running a D-I basketball program to receive some television money and provide students and alumni the glimmer of hope of going on a tournament run but turning all the non-revenue sports into intramural programs.

Only about 25 schools make money or break even on athletics, mostly the Big 10 and SEC schools. There is really no reason economically to run more than the minimum. I went to Colorado. One reason for the school's success under Bill McCartney was the school cut down to the minimum number of sports, dropping baseball, wrestling and a bunch of others, and putting the money into football.

While a school may have a non-revenue sport that is a national power (Colorado has a hell of a ski team) it will not have more than eight sports that anyone cares about.