In recent years, the Southern Oregon University athletic department has done exactly what every college athletic department hopes to do. They’ve built successful programs in a number of sports, including an NAIA football championship in 2014.
And the school’s reward for sustained success across its athletic department is… a pile of debt.
Because Southern Oregon’s athletic success happened fairly suddenly, the university has not built up a reserve fund to handle increased travel costs. The Ashland Daily Tidings has the whole story, which is a pretty interesting look into how winning isn’t always worth it in college sports.
The deficit started building three years ago, and comes from success in many sports, not just football, said SOU Athletic Director Matt Sayre, who took on the school’s top athletic post in 2010. He ticked off a list of post-season teams, including football, men’s and women’s cross-country, women’s soccer and volleyball, wrestling, men’s and women’s basketball, and men’s and women’s indoor track and field. In the last two seasons, the football teams’ seedings meant they had to travel for more games, he said.
“Since 2012, it’s all gone off the charts,” said Sayre, noting that was compounded by SOU’s financial difficulties, which meant the university couldn’t provide much help. The university is emerging from a retrenchment process that involved significant cuts in faculty, classes and majors to save $6 million a year.
The article goes on to note that Southern Oregon’s newfound success has improved school spirit and boosted ticket sales, but at the NAIA level that might not be enough to make up for the massive costs incurred from constantly traveling.
Generally, sports fans (rightfully) don’t think about the financial cost of a team’s success. Obviously big state schools can afford to fly their athletes wherever, but smaller schools must struggle with this a lot. And when teams that bring in little or no revenue to their schools reach postseason play and need to be jetted across the country, there’s pretty much no upside for the universities cutting the travel checks.
There are many ways winning can cost a school money. In 2011, the UConn football team reached the Fiesta Bowl, a big breakthrough for a historically impotent program. Must have earned the school big bucks, right? Nope, the athletic department reported that it lost $1.6 million by going to the game, because it was required to buy a certain number of tickets from the bowl. That’s obviously a very different problem from the one Southern Oregon encountered but similarly shows that winning isn’t always cheap.
[photo: Ashland Daily Photo]