Big Ten Cancels Fall Football (CFB Thread)

Status
Not open for further replies.
#76      
NHL just reported 7000 tests last week with 0 positives. Their bubble seems to be the poster child so far.
The NHL bubbles are in Canada, a place where the government (both liberals and conservatives) have taken the virus seriously from the onset. Canada's infection rates are currently a small fraction of ours. I doubt we can replicate their success in the U.S. Our hope really lies with an effective vaccine.
 
#79      
Really so no kid is gonna get a waiver for his conference shutting down? And what’s the guarantee that the big ten is gonna be playing in 2021?

You think the NCAA will undermine the actions of one of the biggest leagues it has, just to allow players to immediately play elsewhere? Not to mention, how do these other teams accommodate this supposed player exodus on their rosters?
 
#80      

Deleted member 29907

D
Guest
The university is not putting everyone in a bubble, but, they are putting in a lot of restrictions. Testing twice a week for all students, contact tracing, no outsiders allowed without a recent (within 4 days) negative covid test, and very few in person classes. I know there is more, but that sounds a lot safer than life elsewhere.
Safer than most - but again - look at the MLB. We don't have to surmise or wonder - we've seen what even the best laid plans can lead to. And we're talking 19-22 year old males here gang.
 
#81      
I would argue that irrational is valuing tossing a pigskin around more than individuals' lives and health.

Nice personal insult but irrelevant to the point I made. The point is that the grand experiment could possibly show the players are safer playing in a controlled situation then being at home.
 
#82      
Good Points. I see more Team 2 as having young impressionable men who will fall in line a little easier than a 30 year old who is already a millionaire.

I wish I could have this level of confidence in our guys, but then I remember that every year, inevitably, a few guys get suspended for rules violations, and every couple years one of our guys gets in trouble for doing something real dumb. Then I also remember what I was like in college. You can take any group of 85 college kids you want, someone's going to mess up, probably multiple someones on multiple occasions. These are kids whose brains are still developing after all!
 
#83      
Nice personal insult but irrelevant to the point I made. The point is that the grand experiment could possibly show the players are safer playing in a controlled situation then being at home.

How is disagreeing with you and saying that I think society (really just the Big Ten's decision in this case) IS being rational in this moment, in valuing health over football, a personal insult?
 
Last edited:
#84      
Okay so then if we sit out a whole football season while others play.... do you not think that is gonna hurt us majorly financially? Why would players not take off in masses? If I’m a player I’m going to a conference that I’m 100% sure is gonna at least attempt to play. Players have a better chance of transferring and getting a waiver to play, then they do or playing in the spring.

Still waiting to hear on how players leaving effects us financially...🙄. Do you think that B1G programs suddenly won't be able to fill a roster? I don't get it.
 
#85      
Still waiting to hear on how players leaving effects us financially...🙄. Do you think that B1G programs suddenly won't be able to fill a roster? I don't get it.
Not playing affects us financially. Players leaving affects our quality of roster, crappy roster = less donor dollars. Less winning means less butts in the seats whenever we do start up again. Less money coming in means less money for the program, which means coaches salaries get cut. Crappier coaches= less recruiting and development. It’s all going to matter. Also if the big ten missed a whole season while others play then what happens to player development? Those schools that do play are gonna have much more returning experience in 2021.
 
#86      
Navy pilots have a saying in regard to the intelligence community: “We’ll bet your life on it.”

Essentially, the pilots accept all the risks for the intel assessments. This is what the Big10 and Pac12 are avoiding. The SEC, Big12, ACC are in essence willing to bet their players lives/health in order to have a season. The players (unpaid) accept all the risk.

If these players sustain serious lung or heart damage from contracting this virus, that significantly impacts their future and money-making capacity. If they contract it because these conferences were willing to bet their lives on it being okay, that’s significantly worse to me.
 
#87      
Obviously if teams play they are going to get more recruiting attention and be better going forward. But Illini football revenue is not really based on butts in seats. What will fall 2021 seats look like vs the last decade if we don't play this year? I don't think much different. How much of our money is tv revenue sharing? That's not going anywhere when we resume playing. Rosters don't affect that.
 
#88      
Navy pilots have a saying in regard to the intelligence community: “We’ll bet your life on it.”

Essentially, the pilots accept all the risks for the intel assessments. This is what the Big10 and Pac12 are avoiding. The SEC, Big12, ACC are in essence willing to bet their players lives/health in order to have a season. The players (unpaid) accept all the risk.

If these players sustain serious lung or heart damage from contracting this virus, that significantly impacts their future and money-making capacity. If they contract it because these conferences were willing to bet their lives on it being okay, that’s significantly worse to me.
#WeWantToPlay identified the mitigation criteria they want in place, which is doable, and probably more than that is already in place at UI.
A significant number of high profile players weighed their risks of playing vs not playing, and they want to play.
This should have been a "Hey, they might be on to something here" moment for the UI leadership.
But, rather than poll the UI players about whether they want to play under the #WeWantToPlay guidelines, the UI admin canceled the season anyway.
Glad I am not a player or I would be really PO'd.
 
#89      

Deleted member 29907

D
Guest
Not playing affects us financially. Players leaving affects our quality of roster, crappy roster = less donor dollars. Less winning means less butts in the seats whenever we do start up again. Less money coming in means less money for the program, which means coaches salaries get cut. Crappier coaches= less recruiting and development. It’s all going to matter. Also if the big ten missed a whole season while others play then what happens to player development? Those schools that do play are gonna have much more returning experience in 2021.
How have we lost a whole season? By your reasoning, if this is really nothing - the other leagues will prove that out and Spring play should be a no brainer - right?

In the spring there would then be more butts in seats, more donor dollars, more quality of play (since we had more time to practice and train), better coaches (they see how smart we were to wait), better development as the kids had more time to train. See, anyone can make predictions.
 
#90      

sbillini

st petersburg, fl
Not playing affects us financially. Players leaving affects our quality of roster, crappy roster = less donor dollars. Less winning means less butts in the seats whenever we do start up again. Less money coming in means less money for the program, which means coaches salaries get cut. Crappier coaches= less recruiting and development. It’s all going to matter. Also if the big ten missed a whole season while others play then what happens to player development? Those schools that do play are gonna have much more returning experience in 2021.

I'm not a football expert by any means. Not even an expert armchair fan...just an amateur one. But I do know finance. Been working in the capital markets for a decade. Your repeated doom and gloom on the DIA blowing up financially cuz of this is getting a bit too much. Carnival cruise lines - one of the most severely affected industries from COVID, and one of the most financially/operationally leveraged industries in the whole world (still gotta pay for those boats if people aren't on them) issued $3B of debt (just the secured debt, I won't even count the convertibles they also issued) at the end of March. Right in the middle of one the most dramatic decline in the markets we've ever seen. This is a business with ~$4.8B in annual normalized revenue that was down 90-100% at the peak of the pandemic. That's ~63% of sales. As I've discussed in the other thread, DIA will probably need something like a $75M hole to fill assuming ZERO revenue for the entire year. That's, worst case, 58% of revenue. if Carnival can issue that debt, unless there's some random rule i don't know about (which should be paused given the circumstances), there's virtually ZERO reason why a business (as we all call P5 sports on these boards) with (unlike cruise lines) contractually obligated revenue, and (like cruise lines) plenty of hard assets/brand equity can't find emergency bridge funding. They're just not managing it properly if they can't. They need to hire a banker (I'm not a banker, btw).

And don't get me started on Barry Alvarez's comments on cutting sports if they cancel when, from I've seen, they have a $190M SURPLUS in their DIA. That sounds borderline criminal.

To be clear, I actually think the risk/reward on having a season isn't bad and I would vote to play. But, nonetheless, I understand why the decision is being made, and it shouldn't be the end of the world like you make it out to be.
 
#91      
I'm not a football expert by any means. Not even an expert armchair fan...just an amateur one. But I do know finance. Been working in the capital markets for a decade. Your repeated doom and gloom on the DIA blowing up financially cuz of this is getting a bit too much. Carnival cruise lines - one of the most severely affected industries from COVID, and one of the most financially/operationally leveraged industries in the whole world (still gotta pay for those boats if people aren't on them) issued $3B of debt (just the secured debt, I won't even count the convertibles they also issued) at the end of March. Right in the middle of one the most dramatic decline in the markets we've ever seen. This is a business with ~$4.8B in annual normalized revenue that was down 90-100% at the peak of the pandemic. That's ~63% of sales. As I've discussed in the other thread, DIA will probably need something like a $75M hole to fill assuming ZERO revenue for the entire year. That's, worst case, 58% of revenue. if Carnival can issue that debt, unless there's some random rule i don't know about (which should be paused given the circumstances), there's virtually ZERO reason why a business (as we all call P5 sports on these boards) with (unlike cruise lines) contractually obligated revenue, and (like cruise lines) plenty of hard assets/brand equity can't find emergency bridge funding. They're just not managing it properly if they can't. They need to hire a banker (I'm not a banker, btw).

And don't get me started on Barry Alvarez's comments on cutting sports if they cancel when, from I've seen, they have a $190M SURPLUS in their DIA. That sounds borderline criminal.

To be clear, I actually think the risk/reward on having a season isn't bad and I would vote to play. But, nonetheless, I understand why the decision is being made, and it shouldn't be the end of the world like you make it out to be.
Does carnival cruise line support other businesses the same way college football pays for every other athletic program? Illinois is already been instructed to cut each programs budgets by 25%. What is that telling you? College athletic departments barley turn any sort of profits now. Endowments aren’t suppose to be used for athletics, so the money is much more tight then even we think, (I work in an athletic departments financial office). Wisconsin reported income of 158 million with 154 of expenditures in 2019. And it just asked all employees to lower hours, so I don’t think things are as peachy as you think.
 
Last edited:
#92      
#WeWantToPlay identified the mitigation criteria they want in place, which is doable, and probably more than that is already in place at UI.
A significant number of high profile players weighed their risks of playing vs not playing, and they want to play.
This should have been a "Hey, they might be on to something here" moment for the UI leadership.
But, rather than poll the UI players about whether they want to play under the #WeWantToPlay guidelines, the UI admin canceled the season anyway.
Glad I am not a player or I would be really PO'd.

Yeah, I think this is one of the most significant aspects of all this, assuming two major conferences don't play and three major conferences do. (Which, by the way, I don't think is anywhere near a foregone conclusion...have there been any reports that other major conferences have had a vote similar to what the B1G and PAC-12 have? I might be about 12 hours behind the news cycle, but I haven't seen that they have. I've got to think that's coming, unless the nationwide numbers improve drastically in the very near future.)

But, assuming B1G and PAC-12 don't play this season (or in the spring, which I think is unlikely) and the other three conferences do, I think the decision could either be very beneficial or very damaging to recruiting. If all goes well for the schools that play, recruits for the next 5-10 years are going to look at B1G and PAC-12 schools as if they don't sufficiently value the game they love and are dreaming to play professionally. If the schools that play end up canceling significant numbers of games because players get COVID, and especially if the long-term effects of COVID prove to be significant, then I think recruits for the next 5-10 years are going to look at B1G and PAC-12 schools as if they don't sufficiently value their unpaid student athletes (assuming they're still unpaid by then, heh). This may be part of Nebraska's thought process behind their bravado about defying the B1G. "Sure, they might have canceled our season, but it wasn't what we wanted! We value the game! See, here's our tweet at the time!" Honestly, now Nebraska can kind of spin it both ways depending on what the future holds.

Among other considerations, I think the B1G is just looking at the data and betting on the latter. I'm really disappointed, and don't hold an especially strong opinion about what the right answer was, but I think if I had to fall on one side or the other, I'd side with the B1G vote for this and other reasons.
 
Last edited:
#93      

sbillini

st petersburg, fl
Does carnival cruise line support other businesses the same way college football pays for every other athletic program? Illinois is already been instructed to cut each programs budgets by 25%. What is that telling you? College athletic departments barley turn any sort of profits now. Endowments aren’t suppose to be used for athletics, so the money is much more tight then even we think, (I work in an athletic departments financial office). Wisconsin reported income of 158 million with 154 of expenditures in 2019. And it just asked all employees to lower hours, so I don’t think things are as peachy as you think.

Alright, i'll take your rapid fire hot takes one by one
  1. Cruise lines don't subsidize other businesses, but that doesn't matter in this situation. i'm looking at DIA as a whole, including non-football. to fund everything without a single dollar of revenue.
  2. Of course they're going to cut costs. That's part of managing this. As you saw in my other post, I assumed that in my calculations. But that doesn't mean that's your only option. Capital markets are there for this very reason.
  3. Of course athletic departments don't show "profits". They're non-profit institutions. If they should huge excesses, then they'd have to give them up. So what do they do instead? feed them into other programs....or...pay themselves. 80% of hospitals and 40% of health insurance companies in the US are "non-profit." That doesn't stop them from accessing the debt markets when they need capital. DIA's need to figure this out...quick.
  4. You're looking at wisconsin's income statement. I'm talking about reserves. That's balance sheet. Apparently they have a really strong one...if they really have $190M in surplus sitting around, you better be deploying it now. why do you even have it if you're not going to use it at a time like this? And, to be clear, Illinois has debt, but an incremental $75M shouldn't be that hard to find in these markets.
 
#94      

sbillini

st petersburg, fl
Alright, i'll take your rapid fire hot takes one by one
  1. Cruise lines don't subsidize other businesses, but that doesn't matter in this situation. i'm looking at DIA as a whole, including non-football. to fund everything without a single dollar of revenue.
  2. Of course they're going to cut costs. That's part of managing this. As you saw in my other post, I assumed that in my calculations. But that doesn't mean that's your only option. Capital markets are there for this very reason.
  3. Of course athletic departments don't show "profits". They're non-profit institutions. If they should huge excesses, then they'd have to give them up. So what do they do instead? feed them into other programs....or...pay themselves. 80% of hospitals and 40% of health insurance companies in the US are "non-profit." That doesn't stop them from accessing the debt markets when they need capital. DIA's need to figure this out...quick.
  4. You're looking at wisconsin's income statement. I'm talking about reserves. That's balance sheet. Apparently they have a really strong one...if they really have $190M in surplus sitting around, you better be deploying it now. why do you even have it if you're not going to use it at a time like this? And, to be clear, Illinois has debt, but an incremental $75M shouldn't be that hard to find in these markets.

If i'm JW, i'm not bothering calling the SEC or any of that. I'm calling Warren Buffet and getting a loan. This is a classic Warren Buffet situation...and this could really work for both sides.
 
#95      
  1. You're looking at wisconsin's income statement. I'm talking about reserves. That's balance sheet. Apparently they have a really strong one...if they really have $190M in surplus sitting around, you better be deploying it now. why do you even have it if you're not going to use it at a time like this? And, to be clear, Illinois has debt, but an incremental $75M shouldn't be that hard to find in these markets.

Boy, if they have $190M in surplus, are they interested in making a low interest loan to their longtime colleagues and friends (off the field) to the south? (I have no idea if that's legal, and it's perhaps unethical, but still...let's all get creative if we can!)
 
#96      
Alright, i'll take your rapid fire hot takes one by one
  1. Cruise lines don't subsidize other businesses, but that doesn't matter in this situation. i'm looking at DIA as a whole, including non-football. to fund everything without a single dollar of revenue.
  2. Of course they're going to cut costs. That's part of managing this. As you saw in my other post, I assumed that in my calculations. But that doesn't mean that's your only option. Capital markets are there for this very reason.
  3. Of course athletic departments don't show "profits". They're non-profit institutions. If they should huge excesses, then they'd have to give them up. So what do they do instead? feed them into other programs....or...pay themselves. 80% of hospitals and 40% of health insurance companies in the US are "non-profit." That doesn't stop them from accessing the debt markets when they need capital. DIA's need to figure this out...quick.
  4. You're looking at wisconsin's income statement. I'm talking about reserves. That's balance sheet. Apparently they have a really strong one...if they really have $190M in surplus sitting around, you better be deploying it now. why do you even have it if you're not going to use it at a time like this? And, to be clear, Illinois has debt, but an incremental $75M shouldn't be that hard to find in these markets.
Okay but college football does subsidize the majority of the athletic department. So if we are looking to cut cost what should be the first thing to go? How about the parts of the company that don’t make money. Stanford already cut programs and others won’t be far behind. I’m not saying that this is the correct decision or it isn’t. I’m simply stating the financial impacts can’t be under valued. And stuff like this matters to donors. Why would donors keep donating to an athletic department that is currently not doing anything?
 
#97      

sbillini

st petersburg, fl
Okay but college football does subsidize the majority of the athletic department. So if we are looking to cut cost what should be the first thing to go? How about the parts of the company that don’t make money. Stanford already cut programs and others won’t be far behind. I’m not saying that this is the correct decision or it isn’t. I’m simply stating the financial impacts can’t be under valued. And stuff like this matters to donors. Why would donors keep donating to an athletic department that is currently not doing anything?

Ok, i'll try to make my point simpler with less math. The financial impacts of this should be manageable...without having to cut programs aggressively. It's a failure of management (and/or greed) to not be able to do so (barring some weird rules that they can't, which should be suspended). This doesn't mean that programs won't be cut. That's a possibility. I'm just saying that DIA's need to get on this quick, because there are ways to preserve them without major down the line costs.

As for recruits, year lost of playing time, etc. etc.. Sure, that might have an impact. But Illinois losing a year of football recruiting isn't going to result in gymnastics being cut. They were growing their TV revenues for years despite a crappy football program. it'll hurt, at the margin, but it's not going to be nearly as big a deal.
 
#98      
But, assuming B1G and PAC-12 don't play this season (or in the spring, which I think is unlikely), I think the decision could either be very beneficial or very damaging to recruiting.
Probably won't be very damaging to us since most of our recruits don't have offers from the BIG12, ACC, or SEC, but I bet it would impact the top tier schools negatively. Regardless of how things shake out with the pandemic, I bet things go back to normal once it blows over with top players going to the usual top programs.
 
#99      
Ok, i'll try to make my point simpler with less math. The financial impacts of this should be manageable...without having to cut programs aggressively. It's a failure of management (and/or greed) to not be able to do so (barring some weird rules that they can't, which should be suspended). This doesn't mean that programs won't be cut. That's a possibility. I'm just saying that DIA's need to get on this quick, because there are ways to preserve them without major down the line costs.

As for recruits, year lost of playing time, etc. etc.. Sure, that might have an impact. But Illinois losing a year of football recruiting isn't going to result in gymnastics being cut. They were growing their TV revenues for years despite a crappy football program. it'll hurt, at the margin, but it's not going to be nearly as big a deal.
I’m not saying this is the end of the DIA or college athletics. I’m simply stating that when the cash cow of the athletic department takes a loss then we are going to see this trickle down to others. We see this in business everyday. When the top mortgage lender takes off from a bank, usually the support staff will lose a few people as well. I’m saying that recruiting is gonna take a beating, because why would a kid not look more at programs that they can actually watch on the field? Or play in a conference they feel backs football?
 
#100      
Probably won't be very damaging to us since most of our recruits don't have offers from the BIG12, ACC, or SEC, but I bet it would impact the top tier schools negatively. Regardless of how things shake out with the pandemic, I bet things go back to normal once it blows over with top players going to the usual top programs.

No, we don't have many. But our best recruits sure do have offers from (top-half tier) BIG12, ACC, or SEC schools. So if you replace our best recruits with recruits worse than our worst recruits, where does that leave us?

Plus, the trickle down effect. Sure, we don't have many recruits with offers from (top-half tier) BIG12, ACC, or SEC schools. You know who does? Most other B1G schools. If those schools' recruits don't go B1G, that opens up scholarships at top-half tier B1G schools to take our mid-tier recruits. So if you also replace our mid-tier recruits with recruits worse than our worst recruits, where does that leave us.

Obviously it's not that simplistic, and obviously this won't be a driving factor in all recruiting battles. But if it's a driving factor in 10 recruiting battles/year for the next 5-10 years, that's...bad for the B1G and especially bad for Illinois.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.