BOWLING GREEN — The NCAA on Monday approved an extra year of eligibility for spring sports athletes whose seasons were canceled due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The next step will be significantly more challenging.
The NCAA ruling will allow athletes to make up for the lost year, but individual schools still will determine how to allocate scholarship dollars in the future.
At Bowling Green State University, the department of athletics is in the same position as most Division I schools by attempting to predict an unpredictable next year from a financial perspective.
"Quite frankly, we're still gathering information to see where we think we might be financially," Bowling Green director of athletics Bob Moosbrugger said. "It's putting together a puzzle without all the pieces, so we don't know what this means for our current seniors."
Whether seniors will finish their eligibility at their current schools or on scholarship could depend on the financial realities universities will face in the coming months, information the schools themselves still do not have.
The NCAA said Monday that there will be no restrictions on scholarship limits to accommodate returning players, but actually funding additional scholarships might be a challenge depending on the school.
Moosbrugger said if every spring sports athlete at Bowling Green were to return — freshmen through seniors — he estimated BGSU would need about $1.3 million to fund spring sports scholarships over the next four years.
According to U.S. Dept. of Education data, Bowling Green's athletic teams cost just less than $25.8 million during 2018-19 school year, the most recent year for which data is available.
Sources of revenue, however, are in question during the pandemic.
No. 1 is the funding supplied by states to their public universities, and BGSU is anticipating less from Ohio during the next school year.
"We'd be naive to think our funding from the state would not change," Moosbrugger said. "It is absolutely going to change."
Asked about private donations, Moosbrugger said Bowling Green can't assume donations will arrive as easily as they have in the past with unemployment soaring and the stock market slumping after a terrible first quarter.
Further, all schools are waiting to see if the pandemic will affect their enrollment numbers, which plays in outsized role in revenue. All 12 MAC schools also rely heavily upon student fees, which vary by school but are collected with tuition.
Moosbrugger posited two scenarios: One in which additional students stay closer to home for the 2020-21 school year, and one in which students ache to get back to campus to live in residence halls or off-campus housing once stay-at-home orders end.
“But who knows? It's going to be somewhere in those two ranges, because it's not only the state budget, it's enrollment,” Moosbrugger said. “Those are big pieces of information we don't have.”
Moosbrugger said everything will be handled on a case-by-case basis, and BGSU will begin making decisions as it reaches milestone dates such as enrollment deadlines.
For the time being, Moosbrugger said BGSU doesn’t know what will happen with seniors based on the unknown financial situation it faces.
“Financially, what does that mean for them in regards to their scholarship? I'm not sure I can give that answer yet with the information I have,” he said. “I would like to say, 'Yeah, come back and you'll have your scholarship,' but we don't know exactly what this means budgetarily because there is so much missing information.
"We're trying to come up with the best answer without all the information."
First Published March 31, 2020, 8:00 p.m.
