How well insured is South Carolina if football season is canceled?
The college football world can only wait, months away from the 2020 season, but some early signposts and deadlines for the coming season are closing in amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The University of South Carolina projects to settle on if there even will be a fall semester on campus at some point between May 15 and June 15, according to school president Robert Caslen. Students aren’t allowed to return to until the start of August, which means an exception would need to be made for student-athletes to return earlier in order for the football season to start on time.
And if the season gets canceled, the financial implications will be significant. Gamecocks athletic director Ray Tanner explained the insurance situation in a radio interview Tuesday with 107.5 The Game.
“We do (have) some cancellation insurance and it’s handled at the conference office,” Tanner said. “But COVID-19 is not a part of that. We have had protection on some tornadoes and hurricanes and, in the past as you probably know, we’ve had some protection there, but not for this scenario. We do have some insurance that I won’t get into detail about, but it’s not nearly to the degree that we would be in really good shape.”
He said most athletic departments nationally would be in “dire straits” without football.
Football produced $65.405 million of revenue for USC in the last fiscal year, according to a financial report the school sent to the NCAA. The program’s expenses were $36.607 million.
“You have to look at it in more simple terms,” Tanner said. “You got a family and you save for a rainy day, right? But you don’t you don’t necessarily prepare for the monsoon.
“If we get the situation that we’re wiped out, it’s just the coronavirus just doesn’t allow us to do the things we want to do athletically and it affects sport, it affects academics, we’re not gonna be able to fix it.”
Tanner said he has looked at some of the different models for the season that are floating around and speculation, but was not speaking for the SEC or NCAA at large on any of those matters.
On his local front, Tanner is trying to get his department to the end of the fiscal year in the black. For the moment, there have been no discussions about furloughs or staff cuts, but employees have taken steps to save in the short term and long term.
“Our coaches, I give them all the credit, they immediately took it upon themselves, we’ve got to tighten the belts right now,” Tanner said. “We’ve got to look at our budgets deeper than we’ve ever looked at it to try to save as much as we can, not exactly knowing what the circumstances would be going forward.”
This story was originally published April 22, 2020 at 12:37 PM.
