https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/29711237/iowa-cuts-men-gymnastics-men-tennis-men-women-swimming-diving
Is this the first domino to fall?
I was told by a big ten coach that without football this season that it took $50 million out of their athletic budget. Big football schools like Michigan, that school in Ohio, and Penn St will be over $100 milliion in lost revenue this year. We. haven't even begun to think about what happens if NCAA Basketball isn't allowed to play this winter.
Iowa drops mens and women's swimming, men's gymnastics and men's tennis. Can we all agree why Iowa didn't cut wrestling and that they are an outlier when it comes to revenue from wrestling?
What happens to Purdue, IU, Michigan St, Northwestern, Illinois, Maryland, etc when they have to look at this massive drop in revenue in the athletic department?
I was told that a group of Stanford alumni met and they were told they need to raise $30 million to keep wrestling. If that's the case, I'm assuming there isn't much we can do now to help NCAA wrestling in the short term if there is massive cuts and athletic departments around the country begin to drop sports similar to what Iowa did yesterday.
It does raise the question to me of what are we doing now to better Indiana wrestling at the high school and youth level? What are things we can do (or stop doing) to help grow all of wrestling?
In the article posted, the Iowa administration said, ""A loss of this magnitude will take years to overcome," the letter said. "We have a plan to recover, but the journey will be challenging."
While I hope I'm way off base and totally looking at worst case scenario, but the future of NCAA Wrestling doesn't look great. If Iowa is the first of many athletic departments that have to drop sports....I think we are naive if we don't realize that wrestling will be the first cut in most places.
My question is what are we doing to grow the sport more than ever? If pandemic ever ends, which we're all sure it will. It will take years to build back athletic department revenue.
I'm under the opinion that we need to grow the sport of wrestling now more than ever.