BOWLING GREEN — Bowling Green State University will continue collecting a general fee, including the portion for athletics, as part of student tuition during the fall semester.
The athletics portion of the student fee normally would grant a BGSU student access to all of the school's ticketed sports, such as football and volleyball, but the Falcons' sports teams will not play during the fall semester after the 12 full members of the Mid-American Conference voted unanimously earlier this month to postpone their seasons until the spring semester.
BGSU is not alone in continuing its normal practices, as student fees for athletics are commonplace in the Group of Five conferences and a major revenue source in the MAC in particular.
University spokesperson Alex Solis did not respond to an email seeking comment about the decision.
Bowling Green director of athletics Bob Moosbrugger noted that the general fee, which is allocated by the board of trustees, is not only for sports, but for many student activities on campus, and that the fall sports teams still plan on having a season, albeit a non-traditional one.
"Certainly, we make up a large part of that allocation, but the general fee covers not only athletics, but the general health services, rec sports, student union, campus activities, the band, student media, student affairs, late-night programming — a lot of different things," Moosbrugger said. "The student fees aren't just football, and it isn't just athletics. It's a bigger question of the general fee and its totality, but a lot of the other benefits of their general fee are still happening during this school year."
Bowling Green's department of athletics made reductions to staff and its operating budgets earlier this year, and the baseball program — which BG initially cut as part of the reductions — will be privately funded.
Moosbrugger said Bowling Green's overall athletics budget is projected to be about $21 million during the 2021 fiscal year, which would represent a decrease of 19 percent since the 2019 fiscal year.
In the 2019 year, the most recent for which data is available, BG collected nearly $13 million from student fees, though fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has threatened most traditional revenue sources in college athletics.
Cancellations of the NCAA basketball tournament and nonconference football games took millions out of planned budgets. BG lost $2.2 million in game guarantees for planned contests at Ohio State and Illinois during the 2020 football season.
Further, conferences could receive less in payouts from television contracts in a reduced season, or from the College Football Playoff if it is moved or not played. The MAC — which has not announced plans for the spring semester — has a primary agreement with ESPN and a secondary agreement with CBS Sports.
Losses to any of those sources could take additional funds out of BG's planned budget.
"If we don't get any ESPN money, if we don't get any College Football Playoff money, and if I don't recover any mitigation from the guarantee games [at OSU and Illinois], and if we don't have football in the spring or it's played in front of no fans, I would guess I'm going to be short $5-6 million," Moosbrugger said.
Despite reductions and the uncertain nature of the pandemic, Moosbrugger said the department is committed to figuring out an unprecedented spring semester during which most of its teams could have seasons concurrently.
"All hands on deck," he said. "The athletic director might be the game manager for an event if there are multiple events going on. It will tax this staff tremendously, but I think our staff, for the student-athlete experience, is ready and willing to do whatever it takes."
First Published August 26, 2020, 9:38 p.m.
