Cutting Sports at the University of Maryland?

Athletic departments across the country have had to change their spending in order to meet their respective university’s budget cuts, and as Jeff Barker writes in The Baltimore Sun, the athletic department at the University of Maryland may resort to cutting teams in order to save money.  This isn’t an unprecedented step as we’ve seen teams eliminated before. In recent months, the University of Cincinnati has axed men’s track, cross-country, and swimming, the University of Pennsylvania wiped out men’s soccer and swimming, and Barker mentions teams at the University of Washington and University of Vermont that have also felt the burden of cost cutting.

Of course, cutting teams is a last resort as Maryland’s AD Deborah Yow mentions, but it is a move not outside the realm of possibility. As I learned from working for Northwestern University’s basketball team, athletic departments operate on a deficit and very few teams actually make money. Maryland is lucky enough that their football and basketball teams create enough revenue to cover costs, but for every example of a team that is run in the black, there are a Shaquille O’Neal sized handful of teams that bleed money. We’re talking about major conference teams playing the most popular sports.

Barker shows a great example of the cost cutting measures that Maryland is implementing when he writes about the proposed bus trips that the football team will make.  Remember, the football team is run on a surplus, but because that surplus is used to fund other teams, football still has to cut costs. Now, I don’t know the exact financial situation at Maryland, but I assume the athletic department is in a tougher spot because the school fields 27 teams. This is five teams more than the average at the ACC’s eight public universities.

The article is written based on information from the five year plan that Deborah Yow created for Maryland’s athletic department. I’m planning on giving it a read and commenting later this week.

Hope the weekend has been good, and enjoy your NFL fooball.

- Jason