Future of Division III

[Pat Coleman]

If athletes are classified as employees at the D2 and D3 level? That's the context.

[Ralph Turner]

If athletes are classified as employees at the D2 and D3 level? That's the context.

Thanks.

[Ralph Turner]

High school graduation projections by state.

https://source.cognia.org/issue-article/high-school-graduation-trends-in-the-years-ahead/

[Oline89]

  NIL money and the transfer portal have created a fascinating crossroads for big time college football.  Would the University of CO actually be a contender without these new rules? In one way it is great for athletes (I refuse to us the term student-athletes anymore) who generate millions of dollars for their school, and respective conference, to tap into that lucrative revunue stream.  In another way, are we just going to generate even younger, wealthy athletes with misguided outlooks of the real world.  Regarding D3, the last bastion of the student athlete, I doubt anything changes for 99.2% of schools.

[Etchglow]

Honestly, I think that all the money is a slippery slope. Only a handful of sports actually generate money, and those typically fund the other sports. If that revenue has to be disbursed you can say goodbye to most everything that isn't football/basketball, much less sports at the lower levels.

[mhm0417]

Honestly, I think that all the money is a slippery slope. Only a handful of sports actually generate money, and those typically fund the other sports. If that revenue has to be disbursed you can say goodbye to most everything that isn't football/basketball, much less sports at the lower levels.

Agreed and I would take it a step further and say D III is in big trouble 10-15 years from now.  I'm in northern NY state - very rural.  The schools here are all D3 (except for a couple hockey programs).  No one goes to the games , the teams lose in pretty much every sport and the schools athletic departments operate in a deficit every year.  I don't see how the sports programs are sustainable.

[jknezek]

Honestly, I think that all the money is a slippery slope. Only a handful of sports actually generate money, and those typically fund the other sports. If that revenue has to be disbursed you can say goodbye to most everything that isn't football/basketball, much less sports at the lower levels.

Agreed and I would take it a step further and say D III is in big trouble 10-15 years from now.  I'm in northern NY state - very rural.  The schools here are all D3 (except for a couple hockey programs).  No one goes to the games , the teams lose in pretty much every sport and the schools athletic departments operate in a deficit every year.  I don't see how the sports programs are sustainable.

How much tuition do these schools lose if they don't offer 1000 athletic spots and other schools do? D3 doesn't make money on tickets, it makes money on tuition of student athletes. So long as students want to play and make finding a school with their sport a priority, athletic departments make sense.

[Etchglow]

Honestly, I think that all the money is a slippery slope. Only a handful of sports actually generate money, and those typically fund the other sports. If that revenue has to be disbursed you can say goodbye to most everything that isn't football/basketball, much less sports at the lower levels.

Agreed and I would take it a step further and say D III is in big trouble 10-15 years from now.  I'm in northern NY state - very rural.  The schools here are all D3 (except for a couple hockey programs).  No one goes to the games , the teams lose in pretty much every sport and the schools athletic departments operate in a deficit every year.  I don't see how the sports programs are sustainable.

How much tuition do these schools lose if they don't offer 1000 athletic spots and other schools do? D3 doesn't make money on tickets, it makes money on tuition of student athletes. So long as students want to play and make finding a school with their sport a priority, athletic departments make sense.

I don't know, but I just don't think a lot of institutions will want to make up the difference that the NCAA is paying.  Yeah, 32 million for championships split across all 400+ members of D3 isn't that much... But are all the schools going to want to pay?  Also, maybe I'm biased by being an Island school, but when you factor in the costs of travel and such, you have to wonder if some of these smaller institutions are actually bringing in more revenue than they spend on sports teams. 

[jknezek]

Honestly, I think that all the money is a slippery slope. Only a handful of sports actually generate money, and those typically fund the other sports. If that revenue has to be disbursed you can say goodbye to most everything that isn't football/basketball, much less sports at the lower levels.

Agreed and I would take it a step further and say D III is in big trouble 10-15 years from now.  I'm in northern NY state - very rural.  The schools here are all D3 (except for a couple hockey programs).  No one goes to the games , the teams lose in pretty much every sport and the schools athletic departments operate in a deficit every year.  I don't see how the sports programs are sustainable.

How much tuition do these schools lose if they don't offer 1000 athletic spots and other schools do? D3 doesn't make money on tickets, it makes money on tuition of student athletes. So long as students want to play and make finding a school with their sport a priority, athletic departments make sense.

I don't know, but I just don't think a lot of institutions will want to make up the difference that the NCAA is paying.  Yeah, 32 million for championships split across all 400+ members of D3 isn't that much... But are all the schools going to want to pay?  Also, maybe I'm biased by being an Island school, but when you factor in the costs of travel and such, you have to wonder if some of these smaller institutions are actually bringing in more revenue than they spend on sports teams.

Oh. Sure. Free national championship tournaments are in big trouble. But D3 sports at the conference and regional level will be just fine.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

I figured it out a year or two ago, but the NCAA is saving d3 schools roughly $80,000 a year, assuming the spending would be the same.  Now, if d3 had to self fund, there'd be a lot of changes to how that's done, but it gives a baseline.

[Kuiper]

Honestly, I think that all the money is a slippery slope. Only a handful of sports actually generate money, and those typically fund the other sports. If that revenue has to be disbursed you can say goodbye to most everything that isn't football/basketball, much less sports at the lower levels.

Agreed and I would take it a step further and say D III is in big trouble 10-15 years from now.  I'm in northern NY state - very rural.  The schools here are all D3 (except for a couple hockey programs).  No one goes to the games , the teams lose in pretty much every sport and the schools athletic departments operate in a deficit every year.  I don't see how the sports programs are sustainable.

How much tuition do these schools lose if they don't offer 1000 athletic spots and other schools do? D3 doesn't make money on tickets, it makes money on tuition of student athletes. So long as students want to play and make finding a school with their sport a priority, athletic departments make sense.

I don't know, but I just don't think a lot of institutions will want to make up the difference that the NCAA is paying.  Yeah, 32 million for championships split across all 400+ members of D3 isn't that much... But are all the schools going to want to pay?  Also, maybe I'm biased by being an Island school, but when you factor in the costs of travel and such, you have to wonder if some of these smaller institutions are actually bringing in more revenue than they spend on sports teams.

Oh. Sure. Free national championship tournaments are in big trouble. But D3 sports at the conference and regional level will be just fine.

Exactly.  Frankly, the NCAA championships in D3, especially with the emphasis in a sport like soccer on strength of schedule and RvR wins, pushes teams to seek competition against better teams as an insurance against not winning their league and getting the automatic bid.  Moreover, the minimum team numbers for a conference to get an automatic bid, lead teams to join leagues with schools that are far away (the Coast-to-Coast Conference is the extreme example of that).  If you eliminate the national tournament and return the focus to the conference championship, you reduce a lot of travel costs.  The benefit for tuition and enrollment in a period of declining demographics for students, plus the draw for male students (who tend to prefer schools that offer robust varsity sports even if they don't play) and the benefit for alumni giving and engagement, would definitely justify the continued costs of sponsoring teams. 

Nevertheless, I don't think NCAA championships would go away even if schools/conferences had to contribute to organize it and then pay to attend.  One of the big costs is the travel subsidy and the NCAA (or whoever organized the championship) could simply ask schools in contention for selection whether they were interested in attending and willing to bear the costs if selected before they finalized the brackets.  Schools could either budget for that or could ask for pledges from alums if their team made it.  Plus, they could hit up the parents.  After all, many schools already ask the kids to pay for team swag and other costs.  For many kids who come from elite youth programs, they're used to paying for travel etc.  And for schools that don't want to participate, they wouldn't have to.  The hardest hit would be the schools out West, but they are also the schools most used to the travel cost issue from just playing regular season games.

[Ron Boerger]

Shifting championship travel costs to the schools would really impact the island schools who are already at a disadvantage due to all the extra travel imposed on them to satisfy the NCAA 500-mile rule.  Making them foot the bill to travel to a school who only is hosting because other competitors can bus there (at a much lower cost) would rub salt in those wounds, and a lot of schools don't have either the financial base or support from parents/boosters to cover the cost.

Imagine this:  you're recruiting from an island school.  Other schools can say "hey, if you go to [xxxx] and make the playoffs, your parents are going to have to come up with a thousand bucks or more every round because you'll have to fly."  And you know that will happen should the NCAA no longer be able to cover costs.   The alternative would be days long bus or train travel.

[Kuiper]

Shifting championship travel costs to the schools would really impact the island schools who are already at a disadvantage due to all the extra travel imposed on them to satisfy the NCAA 500-mile rule.  Making them foot the bill to travel to a school who only is hosting because other competitors can bus there (at a much lower cost) would rub salt in those wounds, and a lot of schools don't have either the financial base or support from parents/boosters to cover the cost.

Imagine this:  you're recruiting from an island school.  Other schools can say "hey, if you go to [xxxx] and make the playoffs, your parents are going to have to come up with a thousand bucks or more every round because you'll have to fly."  And you know that will happen should the NCAA no longer be able to cover costs.   The alternative would be days long bus or train travel.

As someone from one of those "island" areas in D3, I agree about the inequities of the situation, but I'm just saying that this is what would happen rather than doing away with the championships altogether.  There might be some sponsorships and media rights to defray expenses for those most extreme travel situations, but that wouldn't help much.  You might see fewer island schools do pre-conference trips to other areas of the country as a result, with schools choosing instead save that travel money for a possible NCAA run.

[IC798891]

Honestly, I think that all the money is a slippery slope. Only a handful of sports actually generate money, and those typically fund the other sports. If that revenue has to be disbursed you can say goodbye to most everything that isn't football/basketball, much less sports at the lower levels.

Agreed and I would take it a step further and say D III is in big trouble 10-15 years from now.  I'm in northern NY state - very rural.  The schools here are all D3 (except for a couple hockey programs).  No one goes to the games , the teams lose in pretty much every sport and the schools athletic departments operate in a deficit every year.  I don't see how the sports programs are sustainable.

Per their quick facts, Hartwick had 472 male undergraduate students in the Fall of 2021, and 90 football players. That means almost 20% of their male students were football players.

I work for an upstate NY D3 school, though nowhere near as small as Hartwick. We had a meeting with our AD, who told us that:

The yield rate for student athletes was roughly three times what it is for non-student athletes
The graduation rate was higher than that of non student athletes as well.

That's where the money comes in for athletics. They are absolutely critical for enrollment, and in upstate NY, enrollment is the name of the game.

[Kuiper]

There's a great episode of the All Things DIII Soccer podcast, with Simple Coach interviewing Adrian College president Jeffrey Docking, author of the book The College of the Future.  He's not an uncontroversial figure, but that's mostly related to his plans for shared online courses (involving a for-profit company that he has a connection to) and not because of his work in expanding college sports teams.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fucnBDA0Fg

I think we all know by now that D3 schools (as well as small schools generally, whether JCs, NAIA, DII etc), are using athletics to help drive enrollment and save schools, but Docking started this back in 2005 and he openly embraces the strategy and its clear connection to admissions goals and quotas for coaches.  The most interesting revelation from the interview is his claim this isn't a situation where the sports gambit is no longer working because all DIII schools are doing it now.  According to Docking, it's being used to compete with the big publics for a few more students.  As he said, 85% of students are going to the big public universities in his state of Michigan (or maybe that was the national number).  If only a small fraction of that number go to DIII schools instead because of athletics, and he can get maybe a couple of dozen of them to go to Adrian, that's a massive difference to their bottom line over four years.