Hibner, Phoenix Power Past Drake Late to Win Season Opener--greenbayphoenix.com
Basketball Preview: Oakland at No. 25 Michigan--Maize N Brew
11/29 Big Ten Preview: Rutgers Hosts Hofstra--BT Powerhouse
-Oakland Golden Grizzlies at the No. 25 Michigan Wolverines
- Time/TV: 6:00 PM ET (BTN)
- KenPom Spread: Michigan by 16
This might not look particularly intriguing on paper, but there are some reasons to be interested in this matchup. To start, Michigan looks to followup a quietly good win over Bowling Green earlier this week where the team’s newcomers did quite a bit of damage. And secondly, throwing an in-state rival into an empty Crisler makes this one even more unpredictable. Players to watch for Oakland are Jalen Moore and Micah Parrish.
- Pick: Michigan
Michigan basketball vs. Oakland: Scouting report, prediction--Detroit Free Press
GAME 4: GOLDEN GRIZZLIES AND NO. 25 WOLVERINES FACE-OFF IN ANN ARBOR--goldengrizzlies.com
'It’s crippling': COVID-19 pandemic has financially thrashed college athletic department--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
At places like Duquesne and Robert Morris, the realities are different.
“You know how you solve a problem at a Power Five school? You write a check,” Robert Morris athletic director Chris King said. “You know how you solve a problem at a Robert Morris? You’ve got to figure out a solution. That’s the difference.”
Neither Duquesne nor Robert Morris spends anywhere close to what their bigger in-state peers do — $24.29 million and $18.58 million, respectively, with neither turning a profit — and both don’t rely nearly as much on football to generate funds.
Without exorbitant media-rights hauls, they depend much more on backing from the university itself. As colleges across the country face financial peril independent of their athletic departments, that model has become more fragile. Enrollment figures alone illustrate that fact. Robert Morris had 3,328 undergraduates for the fall semester this year, down 11.7% from the 3,770 it had last fall. Duquesne saw a 4.4% dip in total enrollment. With that loss of students comes a loss of valuable tuition dollars.
Overall, King said Robert Morris could end up with anywhere between $1 million and $2.4 million in lost revenue, with conservative projections indicating a 60-75% loss in ticket sales and corporate sales. Harper said Duquesne has lost about half of its normal external revenues to date. It, too, is hurt by a lack of fans at games, as Harper said the department was previously projecting close to $1 million from ticket sales. When their respective conferences postponed their fall seasons, both schools also lost out on hefty payouts for road football games — $325,000 for Robert Morris to play at Bowling Green and $100,000 for Duquesne to play at Youngstown State, money that goes a long way for those departments.
“There are schools who can weather this despite their hand-wringing, but as soon as the games come back on TV and the machine starts generating the revenue again, they can come back from this,” said John Clark, a sport management professor at Robert Morris. “For the smaller schools or the non-Power Five schools, it’s going to be incredibly difficult.”
Duquesne and Robert Morris’ predicaments are compounded by abysmal timing, with the pandemic serving as a “momentum buster,” as King described it.
Shutdown orders in Pennsylvania temporarily halted construction on Duquesne’s $45 million UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse and cost what Harper said was “basically two months” of progress. Harper said he is hoping Duquesne, which returns almost all of its best players from a 21-win men’s basketball team, will “maybe get some games” in a completed venue this year. Robert Morris, with a new, privately funded arena of its own that opened last year, is set to compete in its first year in the Horizon League.
“When this whole thing is done — let’s say it’s not until next year when we get back to normalcy — when we’re selling ticket sales and corporate sales, did you just lose two years of significant momentum?” King said. “For a school like Robert Morris, it’s crippling in a way.”
King said that for a time, virtually nobody in athletics could spend anything unless he signed off on it. Duquesne has instituted a hiring freeze for positions Harper didn’t deem to be critical and Dukes coaches have made donations to scholarships to support other university operations. However, there was only so much metaphorical fat to trim. Along with having smaller athletic staffs, both Duquesne and Robert Morris had already cut sports in the past decade, with the former eliminating four teams in 2010 and the latter getting rid of seven in 2013. Their departments, as King and Harper said, were about as lean as they could be even before the pandemic.“That has been offsetting to a point, but when you get to the spring, if we have everything going at once, where fall sports that were delayed are in the spring, it will be chaotic,” Harper said. “It has been a major hit.”
Fundraising, an all-important source of money for any athletic department, has presented problems of its own. Some wealthy benefactors mostly have been unaffected by the pandemic and others, depending on their industry, actually have done better. But with much of the country mired in economic turmoil, many either don’t have the disposable income for donations they once did or they feel less secure about giving it away.
“You’ve got to be smart and you’ve got to be compassionate and empathetic at the same time,” King said. “I think most people that are our bigger donors, they understand the situation we’re in. They understand we have to ask. It’s getting a little more back to normal, but until you start seeing butts in seats, I think there’s going to be a lot of caution from your fan and donor base.”
For all the anxieties about how college athletics will escape its current tumult, there are perhaps more questions about where it will go after that. Can things ever truly go back to normal? And should they?
Administrators such as Harper and King believe there are lessons to be applied from the past eight months. There’s some skepticism, though, about whether larger schools with fatter wallets will stray from the status quo should they withstand the pandemic-induced scare. After all, these past eight months and the ones that follow it may simply end up being, to borrow a tired phrase, unprecedented times.
Flames Top Chippewas in Home Opener--uicflames.com
Archdeacon: ‘Fight on’ -- paralyzed former Wright State basketball player Ryan Custer featured in new documentary--Dayton Daily News
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