RALEIGH, N.C. _ While college athletic departments scramble to manage the health and well-being of their newly scattered athletes, and at the same time try to sort through finances thrown into disarray, the coronavirus pandemic has set in motion forces that could fundamentally change everything we know as college sports today.
The shutdown of sports to prevent the spread of COVID-19 not only has implications for the near and medium term but far into the future, as schools wrestle with what college athletics might look like if there's considerably less money coming in. For decades, the biggest universities in Division I have been engaged in an economic arms race, fueled by rapid growth in television rights, pouring money into coaching salaries, administrative costs and facility construction.
To some degree, this global economic crisis has brought that to an abrupt end. To what degree, remains to be seen.
But it's a far bigger macro issue than, say, the micro question of whether there's football this fall. In a world where college sports no longer command the same price, schools will have difficult decisions to make about what sports and what athletes they want to support _ and whether they even can.
"It does give you an opportunity to step back and evaluate," North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham said. "We're always going to have sport. It's just a question of how we organize ourselves. We're always going to run, jump, swim and play and there's going to be people who want to watch that activity. We're organized right now with an NCAA structure, a college football structure, the basketball tournament, conference affiliations, the Olympics.
"Is there a different organizational structure? Is 16 sports the right number? Is 85 (football) scholarships? Those are going to be conversations we're going to have more now."
