So the University if Iowa has decided that they are going to play football. Are we expected to get excited about the fact that the season will be basically meaningless. I mean after all there is no guarantee that they are going to even play 8 games and even in doing so how many limited participants will we have as the season progresses. It appears that this will be a week to week list of who can play and what team gets lucky enough to field their best players Under this scenario no one can really say that because of these factors we can really determine a true winner.
What pisses me off is that despite all the feel good statements it’s really about trying limit the financial impact that not having a football season would create . In between this stop and start scenario The University of Iowa Athletic Department dropped 5 sports programs and subsequently ended the dreams of roughly the same amount (85)of student-athletes and instead made the choice to have 85 players play football.
Yes I know they were non revenue sports and despite what I hear many of you saying theses were not sports that that the athletic departments were going to cut anyway. There are athletic departments across the country that are not cutting out other programs, yes Minnesota is one but it isn’t happening at almost any other school.
What makes it worse is that even now after getting some of that revenue back there is no consideration at all to reverse course and do the right thing . Non-Revenue sports do not need to be cut,
They are an integral part in a healthy athletic program, there are literally thousands of non-revenue sports across the land that continue to and will continue to exist because essentially they are part of an overall athletic program and yes I understand that football revenue is the reason they exist and everyone should be ok with that .
The problem is not the fact that these non-revenue sports exists because of football, the question is could other things be done. It’s not a lot of money here, roughly 3.2 million dollar savings could sustain 5 sports and 85 athletes . I won’t go into how much of that could be saved by eliminating the bloated salary’s of the football staff or the ridiculous ramp up of building facilities I could go on and on but essentially you all know that this escalation of funds for football and basketball are not sustainable and not even practical . There was no consideration of even trying to save these sports by creative funding measures such as cutting travel costs across the board, fundraising, staff elimination in these sports ... no Iowa Athletics just with one mighty swipe of the pen took the easy way out. My gosh we even spent what 6 million dollars on a lawsuit payout to a former associate but we couldn’t come up with sone money to keep 5 sports ?
At what point do you say enough is enough? At what point do we say this is ridiculous that Kirk Ferentz makes more money than these 5 sports spend in a year( Kirk... hint... why don’t you step up and take a 50% pay cut to fund these sports for another year until some more funding can be found)