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“Aztecs Sports–Success–Trouble Coming”

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It’s a great time to be an Aztec.

Enormous success on the field in football.  The greatest season in Aztecs history.  A new football stadium on line for construction sometime to begin in 2020.

But now things have stalled.  The Virus-Crisis has thrown a road block into everyone’s life.

MLB-NBA-NHL, the NCAA, and at SDSU..

And now San Diego State, like every other Division 1-Athletic program in the country, is facing an enormous cash flow issue, with what happened two weeks ago, the cancellation of March Madness.

The biggest money making event in college athletics, is more than just a showcase for college basketball’s best players, getting ready for NBA careers.

It is monster money making event, and the mega dollars taken in from gate receipts, sponsorships and the TV contracts creates a massive pie.  And from that pie, every Division 1-school in the country gets a slice.

That money is what fuels all the other sports programs these Division 1-schools have, in every athletic program in the nation.

A prime example is the information LSU released on Wednesday night about its programs.  Ed Ogeron’s LSU football program made a profit of 56M last year.  LSU basketball had a profit of 1.9M.  The baseball program netted 965,000 in profits.  That’s it.

The other 10-athletic programs LSU operates, all lost money, starting with women’s basketball, which lost nearly 4M-dollars.  Football pays for virtually everything else.

It goes to show how big time athletics has to be funded, and how one sport drives everything else, from Baton Rouge all the way to the Aztecs Athletic Center.

But because of the cancellation of March Madness, the cash register won’t ring this year at the NCAA-headquarters.  And because of that, every Division 1-program is facing a massive dropoff in shared revenue.

The NCAA just 48-hours ago released the data.  Every Division 1-school faces a drop of nearly 60-percent of what they expected to get this year.

San Diego Stte, which has always operated on a slim profit-loss margin, even with an NCAA-basketball tourney team, and bowl games each year, is facing a problem.  Their cut of the NCAA pie this year will come up 800,000-dollars less than expected.  That is a huge drop-off.

Whereas LSU’s football program, Ohio State’s , Alabama’s drive all their other sports, they can withstand one down year.

Can San Diego State handle this kind of drop-off.  The Aztecs football does not generate enormous revenue.  The TV contract is substandard in the Mountain West Conferene so there is no bailout there, even with the new television deal kicking in.

Basketball has been absent from the tourney for 3-years in a row now, another drain of potential revenue.

And now this huge loss of needed money for the coming year, at a university that has 18-sports, that run up bills with enormous travel costs too..
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Schools were told the bad news on Monday.  Division 1-schools were supposed to get 600M-dollars as their share.  Instead from the SEC to the MWC, the take will be 225M. total for disbursement.

It filters down to Division II, which expected 53M, but will have just 13.9M to split up.
Division III went form 35M to just a 10M-payday.

Might there be layoffs coming in the SDSU infrastructure at the Aztecs Athletic Center?  Will John David Wicker asked the university to bail them out with a loan?

With the new football stadium on line,, and some 30M in private funding having already been secured, is there a way to find more loose change to bail out the 2nd floor at the Aztecs Center?

Tough couple of weeks.  The (30-2) Aztecs season comes to a conclusion.  No March Madness games to be played.  And now this financial setback, coupled with what looks like a bad economy going forward coming out of the Virus-Crisis which might end mid-summer..

A good time to be an Aztecs.  Not a good time financially.

How SDSU survives this will be a challenge.

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