North Carolina State athletic department spokesman Fred Demarest isn’t the first of his ilk to come out and declare that his school is not considering cutting any sports in spite of the financial challenges brought on by the global coronavirus pandemic.
But his comments to Sports Illustrated late Wednesday evening, that “eliminating sports is not a consideration at the current time,” pushes this growing issue into a new realm: the Power 5 Conferences.
In the ultimate haves vs. have-nots of college sports, teams in the Power 5 Conferences have so far been untouched by national slashing of sports from athletics departments. According to a pair of wrestling coaches who are tracking cuts nationally, 21 athletics programs have been cut from Division I schools, including the men’s and women’s swimming & diving programs at East Carolina.
That’s among a whopping 125 programs that are being lost nationwide already across all divisions, although 60 of those come from 5 universities that are closing campuses entirely.
Several Power 5 coaches that SwimSwam has spoken with indicated that they’re not concerned about the future of their programs, presuming there’s a football season in the fall.
Demerest did say that NC State will be moving its programs toward more “regional scheduling” for nonconference competition, which means fewer overnights and plane rides.
“We are geographically fortunate in this area, however,” Demerest said. “There are still a high number options available.”
For NC State swimming, those options shrunk by 1 last with the loss of East Carolina, which is about a 90 minute drive away. The Wolfpack swimmers & divers already had a fairly regional schedule. Their only extensive collegiate travel meets were a quad at Kentucky (500 miles away); and the Tennessee Diving Invite.
It is a growing divide between Power 5 schools, the schools with the biggest budgets and the best football teams; and other division 1 institutions. That rift showed early, when the “others” asked the NCAA to drop the minimum number of sports required for Division I membership, but Power 5 programs didn’t sign on.
The roar of a potential rift between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ of collegiate athletics has been calling out for years. While some mid-major programs have been able to cash big checks as a result of football success, most, including notably UConn, have struggled financially under pressure to find ways to try and keep up with the deep pockets of their Power 5 counterparts.
Schools like Texas A&M and UCLA and NC State have very different pressures than schools like East Carolina and Akron. The former will always fill their enrollment quota, will always sell out their football games, and have huge student bodies, endowments, and alumni bases to turn to if they need to cover the costs of temporary downturns. In the good times, they have money to spend on water slides for their football teams and Playstation-ready lockers for their athletes. The latter have to take big risks in search of big rewards from investments like bigger football stadiums or coaching contract buyouts. Those risks are causing lingering headaches for many of these programs.
Could coronavirus be the wedge that finally drives these two groups apart? While it would dramatically change the way we all view college sports, and would hit at the heart of some of the best archetypes in collegiate athletics* it sometimes feels as though this could benefit all parties.
Author’s note: archetypes like the underdog story, which is one of the best things about college athletics.
No way NCSTATE will drop swimming EVER.
The title vagueness made me feel uneasy.
ECU actually averages more fans for football than unc, duke or wake forest, so I don’t think lack of making money from football was their problem.
A lot has been published lately by and about ECU athletics. You should read those. They have been struggling including with their football program. They made an idiotic decision to fire a coach who was an alum and lived for the program and had to pay him to leave and then pay the AD who did it to leave when they fell on hard times after that. It alienated the boosters in the ‘Pirate Club’ who cut giving and it snowballed from there. Compare that to UNC who just got a TWENTY-FIVE MILLION dollar donation specifically for the football program. Even without the endowment the swim team has I don’t think you’ll see any UNC programs getting cut thanks to… Read more »
Bro have you been to an ecu football game, no one shows up anymore. The team has been in decline for years and with that there ticket sales. Even there alumni with season passes don’t show up and they can’t give there tickets away. That’s why it’s so frustrating to see the school pump so much money into the football program when they have/had other great programs like the baseball and swim teams.
They do not average more than UNC. They did in 2019 average more than Duke and Wake Forest.
I live in Eastern North Carolina (45 minutes from Greenville). I know unc says they average more fans than ecu, but they don’t. Yes, firing Ruffin was a terrible idea, and they obviously should have hired Lincoln Riley while they could, but they still have a better core football fan base than unc. I wasn’t saying that unc, duke or wake don’t get more money from football, just that they don’t average as many fans. FYI, I’m not a unc or ecu fan so there is no bias here.
Averaging more football spectators than Duke and WFU says nothing.
Great to hear!!
Braden Holloway & co have created an exciting atmosphere around NC State swimming & diving over the past few years.
Those of you who downvoted this comment, do you want NC State team to be dropped?? If you care about our sport, you shouldn’t wish something like that happen to any team. And if you follow swimming, Holloway turned a bad ACC team to one of the best teams in the nation in less than 10 years…