Football: Profitable? (By The Numbers)

[eceres]

The recent NJ.com article got me interested so I took our finanical report and put it into a google spreadsheet.


Link Here - Feel free to look, give feedback, copy, and use this anyway you see fit.

My takeaways:
1. Saying rutgers football is profitable is a bit of a tale

2. There are no debt services attached to football - claiming the stadium debt is general expense seems liberal (but not as liberal as putting it on general university non-athletic balance sheet)

2. Realize 26.5m of the 70m expenses are non sport specific

3. Realize football should offset women sport expenses due to title IX

My measurement of counting football + all athletic expenses + women offseting sports is overly harsh - but with so much on generic budget its hard to know whats fair.

 

[red sail]

Interesting when you see the break down by sport and specific line items. What is pretty glaring is the losses by Women's basketball, track & field, soccer, and volleyball. I realize the B1G revenue in 5 years will offset all these and this will be a non-issue. I don't think these sports should be cut but as a comparison why did the women's soccer team run a 400k deficit delta vs the men's soccer loss? is it because of making the ncaa tournament and the extra travel expenses?

 

[NorthernKnight]

The recent NJ.com article got me interested so I took our finanical report and put it into a google spreadsheet.


Link Here - Feel free to look, give feedback, copy, and use this anyway you see fit.

My takeaways:
1. Saying rutgers football is profitable is a bit of a tale

2. There are no debt services attached to football - claiming the stadium debt is general expense seems liberal (but not as liberal as putting it on general university non-athletic balance sheet)

2. Realize 26.5m of the 70m expenses are non sport specific

3. Realize football should offset women sport expenses due to title IX

My measurement of counting football + all athletic expenses + women offseting sports is overly harsh - but with so much on generic budget its hard to know whats fair.

Talk about moving the goal posts. Now you want to define football profitability by whether it can fully carry the corresponding Title IX women's spirits teams?

And then somehow say $26 million is non sport specific....so somehow that relates to football?

 

[Upstream]

The recent NJ.com article got me interested so I took our finanical report and put it into a google spreadsheet.


Link Here - Feel free to look, give feedback, copy, and use this anyway you see fit.

My takeaways:
1. Saying rutgers football is profitable is a bit of a tale

2. There are no debt services attached to football - claiming the stadium debt is general expense seems liberal (but not as liberal as putting it on general university non-athletic balance sheet)

2. Realize 26.5m of the 70m expenses are non sport specific

3. Realize football should offset women sport expenses due to title IX

My measurement of counting football + all athletic expenses + women offseting sports is overly harsh - but with so much on generic budget its hard to know whats fair.

Your comments are a bit misleading. For practical purposes, the question of football profitability is really a question of whether eliminating football would allow Rutgers to have more money or less money. If eliminating football creates less money for Rutgers (and keeping football creates more money), then football is profitable.

Let's start with the non-sport-specific expenses. Those are not football expenses. They are expenses that are not specific to particular sports. If you eliminate football, those expenses go away. Certainly a cost-accountant could come up with ways to allocate those expenses to different sports. But those would just be accounting allocations. Any of the cost accountant allocations would be equally appropriate, yet yield different allocations. Allocating them as non-sport-specific is one of the appropriate allocations, and it the way the NCAA prefers the allocation to be made.

Same thing with the stadium debt service. The stadium is used for purposes other than football (like lacrosse). If you eliminate football, the stadium (and stadium debt) do not go away.

The only place you could make a point is with Title IX. If football were eliminated, there would not be a Title IX restriction against eliminating some women's sports. That doesn't mean those women's sports would be eliminated. But the elimination of football would allow the elimination of comparable women's expenses (but not women's basketball, since that is required to compete at the NCAA Div 1 level).

 

[wheezer]

If you build a new science building, no one questions if it generates a profit or loss.... At least with the stadium expansion you can see and predict incoming money

All this talk should go away within 5 or 6 years

 

[eceres]

I fully agree that there are real non-aligned expenses. But saying lacrosse uses the stadium so the debt on expansion is shared is laughable since they come nowhere close to using the expanded part of the stadium.

The whole non-allocated is definitely not footballs responsibility - I know but like stadium debt I'm sure there's other judgement calls that make football look better.

The women's sports component (and if you look women's basketball, soccer, lacrosse, softbsll etc weren't counted) makes sense if your considering cutting sports. Those are pretty much untouchable (you could cut men's bsseball and another womens spor instead of softball) and are acost of having a football team today (just like a factory has a regulstory enforved cost of scrubbers on its smoke stack).

Summary: we should not be cheering footballs profit just yet. This is a positive improvement over last year.

 

[RU848789]

Your comments are a bit misleading. For practical purposes, the question of football profitability is really a question of whether eliminating football would allow Rutgers to have more money or less money. If eliminating football creates less money for Rutgers (and keeping football creates more money), then football is profitable.

Let's start with the non-sport-specific expenses. Those are not football expenses. They are expenses that are not specific to particular sports. If you eliminate football, those expenses do not go away. Certainly a cost-accountant could come up with ways to allocate those expenses to different sports. But those would just be accounting allocations. Any of the cost accountant allocations would be equally appropriate, yet yield different allocations. Allocating them as non-sport-specific is one of the appropriate allocations, and it the way the NCAA prefers the allocation to be made.

Same thing with the stadium debt service. The stadium is used for purposes other than football (like lacrosse). If you eliminate football, the stadium (and stadium debt) do not go away.

The only place you could make a point is with Title IX. If football were eliminated, there would not be a Title IX restriction against eliminating some women's sports. That doesn't mean those women's sports would be eliminated. But the elimination of football would allow the elimination of comparable women's expenses (but not women's basketball, since that is required to compete at the NCAA Div 1 level).

I assume you forgot a few words above (bold/underlined)...

 

[Upstream]

I'm sure there's other judgement calls that make football look better.

Yeah, so those are the challenges that cost accountants face every day. What is the most reasonable way to allocate costs? And the answer to that question depends on how you are going to use the accounting, i.e., what decisions are going to be driven by how you account for the costs.

I'm looking at it from the decision of whether to drop football (since a lot of the anti-athletics rhetoric focused on dropping football for being too expensive). In that case, it makes no sense to include non-specific or stadium debt costs in football, since those costs don't go away with the elimination of football.

Likewise, some football fans on this board are (ironically) calling for elimination of other sports for costing too much. If you are trying to decide whether to eliminate non-football sports, then you want to ensure that costs that need to be incurred to support football are allocated to football.