Couch: Stanford's Reversal On Cutting 11 Sports Shows What BS It Was In The First Place

The COVID Cover in college sports is officially blown. Clemson, William & Mary, Dartmouth and now even Stanford and so many others are realizing they can’t hide behind the pandemic anymore to explain away their gross mismanagement of billions of dollars of football and basketball revenues.

Last summer and fall, colleges across the country were grimly saying the pandemic had catastrophic financial outcomes and that several non-revenue or Olympic sports would have to be cut. 

Stanford, the gold standard of Olympic sports, said it had to cut 11 of them after it had done what it could to “exhaust all alternatives before making profound changes in our programs, especially during this difficult time.’’

So sad, so sad.

Such BS.

And now, just like that, schools that had no choice but to make the cuts suddenly have a choice. They’re announcing that they aren’t going to cut the sports after all. We now have a new trend of not cutting sports that had been cut because of, as Stanford put it last summer, “the harsh new financial realities imposed by COVID-19.’’ On Tuesday, Stanford said all 11 sports would stay. 

You might not have noticed. The story came and went in a few hours because people thought it was about Stanford’s synchronized swimming and squash teams. In reality, this is a college football story, about where billions of football dollars are going and whether the sport is a financial bubble in danger of bursting.

I don’t know the specific finances of each individual school. This is about a trend. What changed at Stanford?

New optimism based on new circumstances. That’s what Stanford said.  New optimism. Last summer, the school said those sports were “not sustainable.’’ Plus, that thing about alternatives being exhausted.

And now, poof, new alternatives! New optimism!

That sounds so much better than when Clemson announced it was able to save sports because 0f  “revised financial projections.’’ Months earlier, Clemson had cut men’s track and cross country “after a long period of deliberative discussion and analysis.’’ Part of the reason for the cuts was the “significant financial challenges due to the ongoing pandemic.’’

So what is really happening? In general, schools that made these cuts faced angry, rich alumni who threatened not to donate anymore. And worse, they faced lawsuits over their lack of compliance with Title IX laws, which require equal treatment for men and women in college sports. 

The dirty little secret in college sports is that few athletic departments are actually in compliance with that law, and to get there would almost surely take significant cuts in the gross overspending on football teams.

These schools don’t want courts snooping into their malpractice. They don’t want media talking about it.

Attorneys threatening a Title IX suit against Clemson uncovered that the men’s football team had a private chef, bowling alley and movie theater, and were given fitted suits for travel. The women’s rowing team had three athletes per locker.

So. . .uh. . .revised financial projections!

We told you about this at the time. I wrote several columns at OutKick when Minnesota cut sports and Iowa cut sports, and others. (Here's a prime example. Oh, and here's another. And just one more.) In each one, I called BS. Most colleges have lavished way too much money on football, creating massive debt. 

There is a misconception that football turns massive profits. Some programs do, for sure. But there’s a difference between revenue and profit. At most schools, the market doesn’t call for multimillion dollar football coaching contracts. Schools can make that look OK by cooking the books, pretending, for example, that building and maintaining a stadium aren’t football expenses but actually general expenses.

And with massive debts growing, these schools have been looking for ways to cut non-revenue teams such as golf, tennis, gymnastics, swimming, track. Men’s gymnastics as a college sport is now just about dead.

“If you’re accounting properly and counting all the costs,’’ Andrew Zimbalist, a highly regarded sports economist at Smith College, told me, “you’d probably get only about a quarter of football schools in FBS generating a surplus. They totally mismanage the money.’’

But colleges take their pretend football profits and pretend to fund non-revenue sports with them. And rather than force the football team to travel with the indignity of a suit bought off the rack, schools dump men’s gymnastics and blame COVID.

But they’ve gone too far now. Stanford’s non-revenue sports athletes take pride in being the feeder system for U.S. Olympic teams. And when 11 of the school’s 36 sports were going to be cut, an alumni advocacy group called 36 Sports Strong emerged and went to work, raising millions from alumni and doing a financial analysis that called Stanford’s claims into doubt.

Last summer, in an open letter from the school president, provost and athletic director, the school said, “The total incremental funding needed to permanently sustain these 11 sports at a nationally competitive varsity level exceeds $200 million.”

Yet 36 Sports Strong said it would be more like $4.5 million a year, a tiny fraction of the school’s athletics budget.

Several Stanford sports had their own advocacy groups raising money, too. And the Stanford wrestling team competed in black, wearing gear without the school’s name.

Sure, COVID hurt finances, but schools shouldn’t have tried to hide behind the COVID Cover. Now, just be thankful for new optimism.

That, plus angry athletes, strong pressure from alumni, and some lawsuits.