Big East athletic budget numbers for the 1998-99 academic year show the Owls dead last in the BE for both football revenues and expenditures. In a future TSL Extra article, Will Stewart is going to disclose football revenue and expenses for the Big East teams, and he gave me a sneak peek at those numbers for this article.

It is a grim picture for the Owls. Temple spent $3.8 million on football, realizing revenues of slightly over $3 million, the bulk provided by the conference’s nearly $2 million check cut for Temple’s share of BE television and bowl revenues. These are ludicrously low numbers. Temple’s football expenditure was by far the lowest in the conference, over $2 million less than the $5.9 million spent by the next lowest, Rutgers, and closer to the $3.1 million spent by Connecticut to field an I-AA program.

In the decade since the advent of Big East football, despite numerous warnings from their conference brethren, the Owls have demonstrated no commitment to big-time football and instead received their annual television and bowl revenue sharing checks and contributed nothing in return. Think about what Virginia Tech has done over the same decade with the same opportunity. Temple is finally paying the price, and they have richly earned it.

The money spent subsidizing Temple’s lousy football program will now be redirected to the remaining seven members, at least until 2005 when UConn, which has demonstrated a commitment to football far greater than Temple’s, comes on board. The rest of us need it, because the Big East financial numbers are not a pretty picture.

Big East athletic programs are, on the whole, losing serious money. The amount of red ink is staggering. Total conference losses for all fifteen Big East teams for 98-99 were $43 million, an incredible amount, especially when the fat conference television contracts are considered. Notre Dame, with its huge football television deal, Connecticut and Tech were the only ones to end up in the black overall. Rutgers broke even.

In total athletic expenditures, Pittsburgh dropped $7.7 million, Boston College almost $5 mil, and Miami over $4 mil, which certainly provides evidence as to why Canes coaches avail themselves of the first opportunity to find employment elsewhere. The money thrown at Temple for generally serving as conference whipping boy will come in handy, because one thing is sure apparent, the Big East is not a financially stable group.

And for most of the Big East schools it will get worse. It would seem the last thing the basketball-only schools (counting UConn now as a football school) need is another mouth to feed from the basketball television trough. Big East financial basket case Providence (which, quite frankly, has no business being anywhere near a major Division I conference), Seton Hall, St, John’s, Villanova and Georgetown all are not only losing millions on athletics but are also staring at a reduction in revenues when Tech begins receiving its fair share, as they did previously when Rutgers and West Virginia joined the fold. It is why they were opposed to expansion, in a couple of cases (Providence and Seton Hall), vehemently.

None of us is going to raise the value of the basketball contract by an amount greater than what we will receive, at least not any time soon. Too bad for them. Unlike Temple, which only received and contributed nothing, Virginia Tech earned their way into the conference through the value added by their football program. The Hokies may not have appeared on CBS as much as we would have liked, but rare is the ESPN Big East game that does not feature Tech. It must be particularly galling for the basketball schools that VT's performance in a sport, football, whose contract generates nothing for them has led to a reduction in their basketball take. Tough.

What has been created is a collection of schools with a rather large divergence of interest, with the voting power now residing in the hands of the full (read: those that play football) members. It would seem the logical conclusion for such a situation would be a disconnection into two conferences of like-minded institutions. Indeed, the only reason I could see for keeping Temple around was for the day when we would need John Cheney’s strong basketball program to join with Syracuse and UConn in providing the base for a strong basketball contract that did not include the basketball crowd. It would appear that is not going to happen anytime soon. But what about down the road?

A glance around the country at athletic budgets shows the biggest ones belong to the guys with the biggest football stadiums, led by Ohio State’s whopping $73 million (one has to wonder exactly what the Buckeyes are getting for that kind of coin), $56 mil at Texas (ditto), Tennessee’s $51 and Florida’s $50. This kind of money means more of everything: recruiting, coaches salaries, luxurious digs for the players, you name it (in the Vols case, a higher quality of term paper writer). The future is going to belong to the richer, and the future, to an increasing degree, is football.

Missing from the list of big athletic spenders are representatives from the ACC, where the top budgets are North Carolina’s $29.6 and the $29.4 spent by Florida State. FSU operates pretty much on a break-even basis, but since the 98-99 academic year, North Carolina has gone from $483,000 in the black to over $300,000 in the red, primarily due to declining ticket revenues from football (Adios, Carl). Throw in the alarms recently raised by Virginia AD Terry Holland over Hooville athletic department losses, and it would seem that things are not all that rosy in John Swofford’s domain.

The ACC, like the Big East, has their problems, which, while not nearly as severe as those facing the BE, are very real nonetheless. Florida State with their $30 mil budget has to contend and compete with the much higher one ($50 mil) at arch-rival Florida. The overall numbers are smaller, but Georgia Tech and their $20.2 million budget is dwarfed by one almost one-half as big in the $30 million one at Georgia. Among the ACC’s so-called ‘Southern Tier,’ only Clemson with a $28.2 million budget is on a par with its in-state rival, South Carolina. Given Roy Kramer’s ability to fill the coffers of SEC schools, close to $100 million now being shared among the twelve schools from the conference’s lucrative CBS contract and football championship, the advantage here is with the Gamecocks. It is not hard to see why these three ACC schools, FSU, GT, and Clemson, are calling for a football-based expansion.

For the most part, ACC basketball revenues have been maxed out. Increases in television money, or the amounts that can be gouged from wealthy contributors for tournament tickets, will increase only incrementally. ACC basketball is a cash cow, to be sure, but it is a mature cash cow. They may screw around with moving the tournament to a bigger arena like the Georgia Dome in order to pack in more paying customers, but the howls from the four North Carolina schools at moving what they consider their birthright means it will only happen occasionally. The only way the ACC is going to tap the new revenue sources that would allow the Southern Tier to get on a more equal footing with their SEC rivals is an expansion that would allow for a football playoff. And therein lies the rub.

Few conferences have a bigger divergence of interest than the ACC has between its Southern Tier and its North Carolina-based schools, more specifically, between Florida State and Duke. The Seminoles have made a mockery of ACC football, winning or sharing (twice in nine years) every conference football title. That the ACC even has a football TV contract is due to FSU’s dominance.

Likewise, Duke has dominated ACC basketball with five straight conference titles. While several schools, such as Duke’s bitter rival North Carolina, Maryland and an improving Virginia program are closer to Duke than anybody is to FSU football, the Blue Devils aren’t going to start losing anytime soon.

Each school also dominates its respective television time. You very rarely see an ACC football game presented to a national audience that does not include Florida State, while Duke in basketball, due in large part to its national OOC schedule, gets more network time than the entire rest of the ACC combined. This is not conducive to conference harmony in the long run.

The view of FSU AD Dave Hart is that any new revenue must be brought in from a football championship, while Duke, a school which, despite an impressive athletic endowment that enables it to spend on a level much higher than fellow ACC private school Wake Forest, still depends heavily on its basketball revenue from television and its auctioning of ACC Tournament tickets. Duke is most definitely not interested in expanding and sharing that revenue or precious and valuable tickets with football powers that would bring nothing to the basketball table. Just as the differing agendas in the Big East threaten to one day fracture the conference, the ACC has its problems among members, too.

Many reading this are aware that in 1999 the ACC came very close to an expansion that would have added three teams, and even closer to a short-term compromise that would have added only Miami. Primarily Duke shot it down, with assistance from the other three North Carolina ‘Gang of Four.’ ACC expansion is not a dead issue and will continue to be on the table, pushed by the network that now holds right to both BE and ACC football, ABC.

Last November 4, the attention of the college football world was riveted to the Orange Bowl as #2 Virginia Tech took on #3 Miami in a game that carried enormous national importance. CBS carried that game, and the same day, ABC’s ACC game was NC State at Maryland. Big deal.

The only conference game the ACC has ever had of similar magnitude to last year’s Tech-Canes clash was in 1997 between Florida State and a North Carolina program that has slipped considerably since. The ACC needs better football games, and despite all of the attention given to improving ACC football these days, nobody is making much of a dent in the lead FSU has over the rest of the conference.

To get the better games that will keep ABC televising ACC football to something more than the same area covered by the regional television contract, the conference is going to have to expand. Very soon, Florida State, Georgia Tech and Clemson will be right back at the table demanding expansion, only to find Duke already sitting in the Greensboro conference offices adamantly opposing it. The Big East has its football-basketball split, and so does the ACC.

Wouldn’t it be nice if conferences could exist where everybody was on, if not exactly the same page, at least the same book? While the BE is jettisoning Temple and its woefully under-funded football program, ACC football weak sisters Duke and Wake Forest continue to hang around mostly serving as fodder. Florida State always seems to be playing Duke and Wake while Florida is tangling with Georgia or Auburn or some traditional SEC power, a situation not conducive to high television ratings.

Wake Forest actually lucked into a bowl a couple of years ago, but that had much to do with the collapse of large numbers of other ACC programs and little to do with greatness in a Wake program that spends only $4.7 million on football, smallest in the ACC and less than any surviving BE football member. They have no chance of ever amounting to anything in football, a fact recognized by Deacon administrators who have often brought up at ACC meetings the possibilities of dropping football and competing in the conference in all other sports, and have always been told no.

Wake is the ACC’s weak sister, carrying the ACC’s smallest budget at $19.6 million, which is padded by about $3 mil annually from tobacco company RJ Reynolds, about the last remnant from the days when RJ himself bought the small struggling Baptist school and moved it from Wake Forest to Winston-Salem, and one that changing political climates will not allow to continue forever. Wake has serious money problems on the horizon, certainly a factor in Dave Odom’s bolting for South Carolina.

At $6.5 million, Duke spends more on football than Wake, but few schools have ever thrown away money on football like Duke has, with two recent 0-11 seasons to show for their cash. The Blue Devils have virtually no chance of ever challenging FSU, or even NC State and North Carolina in the middle of the pack. A committee has been meeting at Duke studying the university’s role in 21st century athletics, and what they are being told is that the football losses and red ink will continue for as far as the eye can see.

Football at Duke or Wake do not carry bright futures, just as in the BE, Villanova, which operates I-AA football at a $2.4 million deficit, must be waking up to the futility of affording a scholarship-based program. Money-losing enterprises do not continue indefinitely.

There are those at Duke observing the writing on the wall and advocating the exploring of the possibility of getting together a grouping of schools with similar athletic philosophies, mainly the one that states that Basketball Rules. A conference of Duke, Wake, Georgetown, Villanova, Seton Hall, St. John’s, Providence, and maybe a couple of others, say, for geographic continuity, Richmond, another school with forward-thinking administrators who have re-positioned the Spiders for whatever lies ahead, could be a monster basketball conference that paid the same lip service to football as the non-scholarship I-AA programs currently in operation at Georgetown and St. John’s. The basketball television contract they could command would be huge, providing each member with more than they are receiving from their current arrangements.

And, while the above grouping could actually conduct conference meetings where everybody was not constantly griping about expansion or football-basketball rifts, a re-conditioned 12-team ACC could begin play with a Southern Division of Florida State, Miami, Georgia Tech, Clemson, North Carolina and NC State, and a Northern one of Virginia Tech, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Syracuse and one of either UConn or Rutgers. I am excluding Boston College from that group, because I don’t think their $5 million deficit bodes well for the long term, either, and I am sending Pitt(sburgh) off to link back up with Penn Sate in the Big 10, making that a 12-team conference, as well. With Carolina, Maryland, Syracuse and maybe UConn, this 12-team ACC could present enough basketball firepower for a rather substantial hoops TV contract also. These would also be twelve teams basically thinking alike when it came to athletics.

Will any of this speculation ever become reality? Given current situations and rivalries, it is certainly doubtful. But ABC is now the dominant player in both ACC and BE football and will get what it wants, which is better games, eventually, one way or another. And who thought the day would finally come when Temple was actually booted out of the BE?

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