Despite coronavirus, South Carolina athletic department finished year in the black
The University of South Carolina athletic department has yet to release its full set of 2019-20 financials. A public records request yielded a response that they were not yet finished and would have to be audited.
But in a radio interview with 107.5 The Game on Wednesday, Gamecocks athletic director Ray Tanner said the department did manage to stave off one concern.
Despite the financial impacts of the coronavirus, it finished the year in the black.
“We just finished our 19-20 budget on June 30,” Tanner said. “We did stay in the black once again. For 2021, it’s a daunting task.”
The pieces of how that came together won’t be publicly clear for a while, but there are a few hints one can find.
At the start of last year, the school projected a surplus of more than $12 million between the school’s expenses and revenues. The department had projected $125.4 million in revenue and $113 in expenses at the start of the year.
The loss of the NCAA winter and spring championships, notably the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, took a bite out of the distribution from the SEC. The NCAA’s overall distribution was cut down from $600 million to $250 million, but that still filters through the SEC and would not account for revenue possibly lost by the SEC Network.
Last year’s SEC distribution was $44.6 million per school.
The department actually saved a little money with the cancellation of spring sports and not having to travel on what projected to be a long run in the NCAA women’s basketball tournament.
Several of the highest-paid coaches and administrators in the department, notably Tanner, Will Muschamp, Dawn Staley and Frank Martin, took 10% pay cuts as well.
The coronavirus pandemic has caused wide-scale financial losses across the world of college football.
According to the database from USA Today, South Carolina’s athletic department hasn’t been in the red since 2006.
Managing that again will be heavily reliant on what form the football season takes and a slew of other factors. Tanner said the budget has already been cut by 15%, and a set of university-wide furloughs project to affect more than 50 highly-paid athletic department employees.
Another factor on that front count be cutting down on travel, perhaps avoiding hotels on road trips for health reasons, i.e. taking one-day trips. Tanner said he also spoke to Will Muschamp about the possibility of players not staying in hotels the night before home games.
Tanner spoke on the same day Stanford cut 11 smaller sports, and other schools across Division I have cut more than 50 teams. That’s not something in the cards at the moment for South Carolina, but Tanner has said nothing is 100% off the table.
“That’s a very serious issue to deal with,” Tanner said. “But I’m hopeful that that’s our last resort when it comes to cutting sports.”
