Sunday, the Gopher athletic program was the focus of a 60 Minutes piece that said schools around the country were “sacrificing secondary sports on the altar of big time college sports,” according to a description of the program by CBS News.
In September, the University of Minnesota announced it would be cutting men's gymnastics, men's tennis and both the indoor and outdoor men's track and field teams due to financial constraints brought on by COVID-19.
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Men’s gymnast Shane Wiskus, and men’s gymnastics coach Mike Burns both spoke on 60 Minutes about their respective sports being dropped by the University of Minnesota despite strong efforts to self-fund them.
Athletic Director Mark Coyle declined to speak to 60 Minutes but did release a statement.
"The University of Minnesota believes that the changes it has made, however heartbreaking, will best position its department of athletics for sustainable, long-term success," Coyle's statement said.
Tuesday, on the WCCO Morning News with Dave Lee, Coyle spoke about the 60 Minutes piece and the challenges athletic directors are facing when it comes to funding, and also challenges with Title IX.
“So many programs across the country, I think there's been over a hundred programs cut, and those are heartbreaking decisions and I completely understand, Coach Burns and others who've been impacted by that,” Coyle told WCCO. “And obviously the last thing anybody wants to do is to have to make a difficult decision like that. But obviously we work closely with our president, with our Board of Regents, who made that difficult decision.”
Coyle pointed out that the university will still honor the commitment made in the scholarships within those programs.
“And again, our goal is to make sure we'll provide them with a great experience,” Coyle said. “We'll honor the scholarships of those student athletes who were impacted. I think overall 34 student athletes were impacted. I think 15 or 17 of them will actually graduate this spring or this summer from us. So again, we'll make sure we take care of them, but yeah, just a difficult time for so many programs across the country, including Minnesota.”
One of the main reasons behind the cuts comes from pressure placed on all the other programs by football, and the commitment to Title IX. Title IX was passed in 1972 and essentially prohibits gender and sex-based discrimination in public institutions. It has had a long-lasting effect on college athletics, especially in the growth of women’s sports.
But those same restrictions create an imbalance due to the size of major college football programs. The Gophers have about 115 athletes on the football team which is significantly more than any women’s athletic program.
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Coyle was asked about a potential proposal that removes football programs from the regular athletic departments and allows them to function independently.
“You hear chatter about this every year and obviously the pandemic is shown a spotlight on the program and how it's set up. And some of the challenges we have within that program. So I think it's helpful anytime. You know, I think the one thing we've all learned is that change is inevitable and we can either embrace it or try to push it off. And I think we need to take a hard look at, is there a different way to look at college football and how to manage that? So I know we're definitely open to having those conversations and learning more about it.”
Will the programs cut by the university ever be brought back? Coyle says the financial ramifications of 2020 will last a long time and it’s impossible to say right now.
“I don't know, I can't predict a future,” Coyle told Dave Lee. “But what I can tell you, the financial pressure that everybody's facing, you've heard me talk about this before Dave, our revenue streams, whether you're talking about Minnesota, St. Thomas, Syracuse, and Boise St., schools I've worked at, et cetera. Our revenue streams are very similar. You have your media distribution, which is for us the Big Ten Network, obviously money from the NCAA Basketball Championship. You have your ticket sales, you have your fundraising, you have your Gopher Sports Properties which sell all of our advertising, our sponsorships, and then you have licensing revenue. And the pandemic has literally put a strain on all those revenue streams.
“For example, in a normal year, Big Ten football provides about 95 games to our media partners a year. I think we're going to be lucky to get maybe 54, 55 games if no more games are canceled this year. So we're almost down half our inventory for football. We're not allowed to have any fans in those venues at all right now. So we have no ticket revenue.
"We have no scholarship seating revenue. So again, Dave, I think the financial strain that we're all feeling is going to be felt for a while. We've all got to figure out how we're going to manage that moving forward. So it's hard to say what that looks like in the future, but again, our goal is to make sure we provide opportunities for all student athletes.”
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