One of the things that need to be hammered out now that the Big Ten has decided to put football back on the docket is television packages. These things are agreed to well in advance but were thrown into turmoil when the season was postponed.
Nobody knows what or how those will look like as they are re-negotiated for the season that begins in October, but there should be some additional money not originally accounted after the postponement for the conference — including Ohio State — once everything is worked out. And with Ohio State facing a projected $107 million deficit, some extra money sure would help to offset a very trying year financially.
While meeting with some media members on a Zoom call on Wednesday, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith was extremely solemn about where the budget stood and how vague things stand with any television revenue to help offset it.
“Our media rights with football are still being determined with our television partners,” Smith said during Zoom call with reporters. “There’s no recognition of that (in the budget) at this point in time. Regardless of what all the experts say nationally relative to their assumptions, our conference office with our television committee are working closely with our television partners to ascertain what our value of what our current schedule is.”
Ohio State athletics projects $107 million deficit for 2020-2021 https://t.co/ZN5eiFka6e
— Buckeyes Wire (@BuckeyesWire) September 23, 2020
Just for comparison’s sake, Ohio State reportedly made about $34 million from television contracts in 2019. That, however, was with an eleven-game regular-season. It’s unclear how much of that was for postseason success, but if we assume some of the same numbers for 2020, OSU may be looking somewhere in the ballpark of $24.8 million just on doing math on a per-game basis. That’s nothing that’s been reported our worked out, just simple math.
It is a pandemic year though so throw simple math out the window. There’s no guarantee all the games even get played. The television partners also have their own budgetary concerns to worry about as the world still comes to grip with all the economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis.
No matter how you look at it, the self-sustained OSU athletic department is facing some pretty significant debt it’ll have to make up by way of budget cuts and loans. Any television revenue will help, but it will only put a small dent in the mountain of a budgetary deficit.
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