College Wrestling Team Is First Top-Tier NCAA Squad Cut to Virus

(Bloomberg) -- Old Dominion University is discontinuing its wrestling team, the first major Division I sports program to be axed as schools across the country face the revenue shortfalls that will come with the coronavirus outbreak.

The Norfolk, Virginia, school announced Monday night that the team would be dropped effective immediately, a move it expects will save $1 million in expenses. While it had been reviewing the team for months, Athletic Director Wood Selig said the Covid-19 pandemic made the decision “even more clear.”

“We are required to be responsible with departmental resources,” Selig said. “This decision will better allow the remaining sports to compete at a national level.”

Old Dominion’s wrestling program is the first major-college sports program lost to the crisis, but it won’t be the last. Schools in the NCAA’s top tier have spent lavishly in the last decade, with long-term expenses tied to coaching contracts, facility projects and debt service. With winter sports and spring sports canceled, budgets will need to be rewritten.

A recent survey of major-college athletic directors found that more than 60% of those who responded were bracing for a revenue drop of 20% or more in 2020-21. The NCAA recently said it would distribute just $225 million to schools this year, down 63% from the $600 million it originally projected, because of the canceled men’s basketball tournament.

Those decisions are likely to come in the coming months. Most schools operate on a fiscal year that begins in the summer, so budgets are in the process of being set. Making things even more complicated is the uncertainty around the college football season, the major money-maker for almost every major Division I program.

‘Hard Winter’

“We’re probably in a phase right now that we’re in a long, hard winter, but if we can’t play football this fall, it’s Ice Age time,” Jamie Pollard, the athletic director at Iowa State University, told reporters this week. “There is nobody in our industry right now that could reasonably forecast a contingency plan for helping to get through not playing any football games.”

Iowa State announced that its athletic staff, including coaches, will be taking a temporary 20% pay cut. Other cost-saving initiatives at the Ames school include freezing ticket prices and offering new payment plans for fans who might need more financial flexibility.

The men’s teams in less-popular sports, like Old Dominion’s 32-man wrestling squad, are likely the most vulnerable to further crisis-related cuts. They don’t bring in revenue, and under Title IX laws they’re required to be offset by an equal number of women’s roster spots -- in sports that also generally don’t bring in money.

Old Dominion, which competes in Conference USA for most sports, had an athletics budget of about $45 million in 2018. The program is heavily subsidized -- it received $28 million in student fees to balance its budget.

The move will drop Old Dominion’s NCAA sports offerings to 16, the minimum for schools that offer top-tier college football.

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