https://www.rcnky.com/articles/2016/03/0...zon-league

We post a lot about reducing travel expenses with tight conference footprints etc. I was googling "atlantic sun exit fees" because NJIT just jumped, and found the article above.

Towards the end of the article about the NKU-ASUN settlement, this paragraph:

Quote:Seven of the other nine member institutions are located within 300 miles of NKU whereas only one other member of the A-Sun was located within 300 miles, saving NKU more than $250,000 each year in travel costs, the university estimated. That allows for more classroom time and with the move to the Horizon League, NKU athletes earned a collective 3.24 grade point average in the fall, the highest ever at NKU.

The Atlantic Sun ( to @ASUNCommish) that NKU left had 7 schools, 2 in mid- to south Florida, 2 in Jacksonville, 1 in Atlanta, 1 in Nashville, 1 in upstate South Carolina. One ASUN school was within 300 miles of NKU, 7 of 9 Horizon schools were within 300 miles of NKU. (And since then they've traded Valpo for IUPUI and PWFW). Unless your conference has half their schools in the Greater New York tristate metro area, you're not getting a tighter footprint than the Horizon League.

Savings for an outlier moving from a far-flung league to a tight-footprint league? $250,000 per year.

Granted, they're not shipping a football team, equipment trucks, maybe a few buses of cheerleaders and band, I don't know. But we have a number, ladies and gentlemen. But they're a pretty strong case of a school making a big reduction in travel.

EDIT: The article does point out (it's written after almost a full year in the Horizon League) the big travel TIME savings, and points out the athlete GPA increase. But we mostly talk money, so.....

Belmont left the ASUN for the very same travel reasons. Rather be in the tight and compact OVC than spread-out configuration of the ASUN.

A higher estimate is given by a UMKC official.

Quote:More than $1 million a year in travel savings, one UMKC official said.

https://www.kansascity.com/sports/colleg...84187.html

So $250,000 for Northern Kentucky, $1,000,000 for UMKC. I think that reflects the fact that UMKC had to fly to everyone in the WAC, plus the WAC is so spread out that travel partners don't help at all.

(06-13-2020 06:29 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  A higher estimate is given by a UMKC official.

Quote:More than $1 million a year in travel savings, one UMKC official said.

https://www.kansascity.com/sports/colleg...84187.html

So $250,000 for Northern Kentucky, $1,000,000 for UMKC. I think that reflects the fact that UMKC had to fly to everyone in the WAC, plus the WAC is so spread out that travel partners don't help at all.

Or maybe the UMKC figure, provided by an official who didn't want to be named, is an overestimate (or a poor guess).

FAMU claims $400k on MEAC -> SWAC on slide 8
http://www.famu.edu/BOT/Athletics%20BOT%...Final_.pdf

Either the UMKC figure is a substantial overestimate (exaggeration), or the figures they report to the federal government are not correct.

Each school reports athletic expenses to the feds that are published in the Equity in Athletics database.

Travel expenses are part of the "operating expenses" line item.

Quote:Operating (Game Day) Expenses - All expenses an institution incurs attributable to home, away, and neutral-site intercollegiate athletic contests (commonly known as game-day expenses), for (A) Lodging, meals, transportation, uniforms, and equipment for coaches, team members, support staff (including, but not limited to team managers and trainers), and others; and (B) Officials.

For 2018-19, a school year when UMKC was in the WAC, they reported a grand total of $1.85 million for all "operating expenses" (about $850,000 for men's teams and about $1 million for women's teams). Remember, that's not just travel expenses, it's travel plus all that other stuff. They're not cutting $1 million/year out of that $1.85 million just by reducing travel costs. The actual number has to be less than $1 million, if the data they report to the federal government is accurate.

(06-13-2020 09:31 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(06-13-2020 06:29 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  A higher estimate is given by a UMKC official.

Quote:More than $1 million a year in travel savings, one UMKC official said.

https://www.kansascity.com/sports/colleg...84187.html

So $250,000 for Northern Kentucky, $1,000,000 for UMKC. I think that reflects the fact that UMKC had to fly to everyone in the WAC, plus the WAC is so spread out that travel partners don't help at all.

Or maybe the UMKC figure, provided by an official who didn't want to be named, is an overestimate (or a poor guess).

Very possible. Their travel budget for 2016-17 was $1.7M, according to https://missouri.app.box.com/s/l3bt3m4oq...2995319684, hat tip https://www.kcur.org/sports/2018-03-09/u...ent-budget

That number includes food before home games, and I don't have a comparison number for a non-WAC school. UMKC's travel situation (or frankly any WAC school) was very rough, and they're moving to one of the more enviable travel situations in Division I.

(06-13-2020 09:55 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(06-13-2020 09:31 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(06-13-2020 06:29 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  A higher estimate is given by a UMKC official.

Quote:More than $1 million a year in travel savings, one UMKC official said.

https://www.kansascity.com/sports/colleg...84187.html

So $250,000 for Northern Kentucky, $1,000,000 for UMKC. I think that reflects the fact that UMKC had to fly to everyone in the WAC, plus the WAC is so spread out that travel partners don't help at all.

Or maybe the UMKC figure, provided by an official who didn't want to be named, is an overestimate (or a poor guess).

Very possible. Their travel budget for 2016-17 was $1.7M, according to https://missouri.app.box.com/s/l3bt3m4oq...2995319684, hat tip https://www.kcur.org/sports/2018-03-09/u...ent-budget

That number includes food before home games, and I don't have a comparison number for a non-WAC school. UMKC's travel situation (or frankly any WAC school) was very rough, and they're moving to one of the more enviable travel situations in Division I.

It's definitely a massive improvement over the WAC, but the Summit does stretch pretty far north to south. Grand Forks, ND to Tulsa is 876 miles, about the same as Atlanta to New York (866). With Denver throwing things off as a western outlier, the leagues is also far flung West to East; Denver to Moline, IL is 844 miles.

Other leagues have much smaller travel footprints: Ivy, America East, NEC, MAAC, Patriot, MAC, Horizon, MVC, OVC, Big South, SoCon, SWAC, Big West (except the Hawaii part), maybe another one or two who don't immediately come to mind.

On the other hand, the travel is mitigated a bit for UMKC since they're right in the middle.
Maybe that was your point in the first place.

(06-13-2020 09:54 PM)Wedge Wrote:  Either the UMKC figure is a substantial overestimate (exaggeration), or the figures they report to the federal government are not correct.

Each school reports athletic expenses to the feds that are published in the Equity in Athletics database.

Travel expenses are part of the "operating expenses" line item.

Quote:Operating (Game Day) Expenses - All expenses an institution incurs attributable to home, away, and neutral-site intercollegiate athletic contests (commonly known as game-day expenses), for (A) Lodging, meals, transportation, uniforms, and equipment for coaches, team members, support staff (including, but not limited to team managers and trainers), and others; and (B) Officials.

For 2018-19, a school year when UMKC was in the WAC, they reported a grand total of $1.85 million for all "operating expenses" (about $850,000 for men's teams and about $1 million for women's teams). Remember, that's not just travel expenses, it's travel plus all that other stuff. ...

(06-13-2020 09:55 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  Very possible. Their travel budget for 2016-17 was $1.7M, according to https://missouri.app.box.com/s/l3bt3m4oq...2995319684, hat tip https://www.kcur.org/sports/2018-03-09/u...ent-budget

That number includes food before home games, and I don't have a comparison number for a non-WAC school. UMKC's travel situation (or frankly any WAC school) was very rough, and they're moving to one of the more enviable travel situations in Division I.

So $1.7m on travel expenses and $150,000 on other "Game Day Expenses"?

Given the move from the WAC (it's kind of redundant to say "the edge of" for such an Island of Misfit Toys), to the middle of the Summit, dropping the travel component from $1.7m to $700,000 seems like it's in the realm of possibility.

Though maybe it's dropping it from $1.7m to $800,000 and "$1m" is rounding up from $900,000 in savings.

I suspect there was some exaggeration with the $1M savings, but the Summit move could save them some serious cash. Assuming UST gets in this week, there is a real chance the Summit could move to Fri-Sat games for most or all of the travel partners. This means for every conference trip, a schools will be paying for one less flight, one or two fewer days of charter buses or van rentals, and one or two fewer nights in a hotel. And that's eight of those conference trips a year just for men's basketball. Multiply that by three or four for all the other team sports. The savings will add up.

If I was the Summit commish, I'd pair things up this way:

NDSU(Fargo)/UND(Grand Forks) - about 1hr apart by car - regional airport in Fargo
SDSU(Brookings)/USD(Vermillion) - about 2hr apart by car - regional airport halfway between in Sioux Falls
UNO(Omaha)/UMKC(Kansas City) - about 3hr apart by car - regional or major airports in both cities
DU(Denver)/ORU(Tulsa) - about 1.5hr apart by air - major hub in Denver/regional airport in Tulsa - daily non-stop flights between the two
UST(Minneapolis)/WIU(Macomb) - only bad pairing, but Macomb sucks to get to - either 7hr by car, or a flight from MSP to a nearby city then bus

Four of the five sets of travel partners are close enough to allow games on consecutive days. I don't think the WAC has a single pair of schools that could do the same. Maybe Cal Baptist and UC Bakersfield, but I don't know about taking I-210 around the LA metro; feels like it could turn into a traffic nightmare when you're trying to get to a game later that day.



edit:
Another group of pairing options could be:
NDSU/UND
SDSU/USD
UNO/WIU - about 5.5hr by car
UMKC/ORU - about 4hr by car
UST/DU - tons of 2hr flights between two major hubs

The more I think about it, the more I like this set of pairings. Seems weird to put the second-most east with the most west, but it just makes sense with both of them being major airline hubs. And the WIU trip drops from 7-8hrs to 5-6hrs and makes consecutive-day games doable.

Bottom line is these are estimates, and the true values won't be known until travel actually takes places and actual costs are incurred and recorded.

And because of this, different interest groups will come up with estimates that support their position. E.g., a group that wants their school to remain in conference X will produce an estimate showing very little savings or maybe even added costs in moving to conference Y. Those who want to leave for Y will produce estimates showing big travel savings for the move. This is because one thing both groups likely have in common is that neither favors or opposes the proposed move *because* of travel costs. That's just an excuse to cover for a deeper ideological/emotional reason.

(06-13-2020 09:54 PM)Wedge Wrote:  Either the UMKC figure is a substantial overestimate (exaggeration), or the figures they report to the federal government are not correct.

Each school reports athletic expenses to the feds that are published in the Equity in Athletics database.

Travel expenses are part of the "operating expenses" line item.

Quote:Operating (Game Day) Expenses - All expenses an institution incurs attributable to home, away, and neutral-site intercollegiate athletic contests (commonly known as game-day expenses), for (A) Lodging, meals, transportation, uniforms, and equipment for coaches, team members, support staff (including, but not limited to team managers and trainers), and others; and (B) Officials.

For 2018-19, a school year when UMKC was in the WAC, they reported a grand total of $1.85 million for all "operating expenses" (about $850,000 for men's teams and about $1 million for women's teams). Remember, that's not just travel expenses, it's travel plus all that other stuff. They're not cutting $1 million/year out of that $1.85 million just by reducing travel costs. The actual number has to be less than $1 million, if the data they report to the federal government is accurate.

It's also going to depend on the level of school & number of athletes.

For example:

Ohio State has 629 athletes and $22.7 million in game-day operating expenses.

Purdue has 344 athletes and $14.1 million in game-day operating expenses.

Cincinnati has 311 athletes and $8 million in game-day operating expenses.

Xavier has 172 athletes and $5.6 million in game-day operating expenses.

Northern Kentucky has 127 athletes and $2 million in game-day operating expenses.

(06-15-2020 08:35 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  Bottom line is these are estimates, and the true values won't be known until travel actually takes places and actual costs are incurred and recorded.

And because of this, different interest groups will come up with estimates that support their position. E.g., a group that wants their school to remain in conference X will produce an estimate showing very little savings or maybe even added costs in moving to conference Y. Those who want to leave for Y will produce estimates showing big travel savings for the move. This is because one thing both groups likely have in common is that neither favors or opposes the proposed move *because* of travel costs. That's just an excuse to cover for a deeper ideological/emotional reason.

You maybe didn't read the link. Northern Kentucky's estimate was towards the end of their first year in the Horizon. (The article was sparked by NKU and ASUN settling up the negotiated exit fee). There are a lot of uncertainties, but Northern Kentucky's number was mostly based on actual spending from the then-current-mostly-completed year.

You have a fairly strong point about estimates of how much money we're about to save by doing the thing we're committed to doing.

ODU's last full year in CAA 2012-2013 travel costs 2.2M. Most recent available in CUSA 2018-2019 travel costs of 3.9M.

http://www.apa.virginia.gov/reports/ODU_NCAA-2013.pdf

http://www.apa.virginia.gov/reports/OldD...AA2019.pdf

(06-15-2020 10:34 AM)mturn017 Wrote:  ODU's last full year in CAA 2012-2013 travel costs 2.2M. Most recent available in CUSA 2018-2019 travel costs of 3.9M.

http://www.apa.virginia.gov/reports/ODU_NCAA-2013.pdf

http://www.apa.virginia.gov/reports/OldD...AA2019.pdf

It seems you can buy quite a bit of complaining with $1.7m.

(06-15-2020 01:29 PM)BruceMcF Wrote:  

(06-15-2020 10:34 AM)mturn017 Wrote:  ODU's last full year in CAA 2012-2013 travel costs 2.2M. Most recent available in CUSA 2018-2019 travel costs of 3.9M.

http://www.apa.virginia.gov/reports/ODU_NCAA-2013.pdf

http://www.apa.virginia.gov/reports/OldD...AA2019.pdf

It seems you can buy quite a bit of complaining with $1.7m.

ODU is reporting $7.2 million in "Operating (Game-Day) Expenses" for 2018-19 in their EADA report, which is consistent with travel costs being higher than UMKC or NKU.

OTOH, given that ODU says the vast majority of their cost increase is for sports other than football, maybe they should be asking themselves why they don't return to the CAA, play football as an FBS indy, and then use the travel cost savings to spend more on football.

And the CAA isn't even all that geographically compact of a conference, but a good amount of the schools are at least in major media markets/easy to get to

(06-15-2020 01:43 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(06-15-2020 01:29 PM)BruceMcF Wrote:  

(06-15-2020 10:34 AM)mturn017 Wrote:  ODU's last full year in CAA 2012-2013 travel costs 2.2M. Most recent available in CUSA 2018-2019 travel costs of 3.9M.

http://www.apa.virginia.gov/reports/ODU_NCAA-2013.pdf

http://www.apa.virginia.gov/reports/OldD...AA2019.pdf

It seems you can buy quite a bit of complaining with $1.7m.

ODU is reporting $7.2 million in "Operating (Game-Day) Expenses" for 2018-19 in their EADA report, which is consistent with travel costs being higher than UMKC or NKU.

OTOH, given that ODU says the vast majority of their cost increase is for sports other than football, maybe they should be asking themselves why they don't return to the CAA, play football as an FBS indy, and then use the travel cost savings to spend more on football.

Well, take a look at the revenue side for those years. Specifically the NCAA/Conference distributions. Independence is not a good option for any FBS school that doesn't have an invite to the Big East.

(06-15-2020 02:05 PM)TDenverFan Wrote:  And the CAA isn't even all that geographically compact of a conference, but a good amount of the schools are at least in major media markets/easy to get to

No it's not but it is Virginia centric. We won't be in an FBS league that compact, that's a given. But that doesn't change the fact that it makes zero sense to continue to travel to Texas for conference games when there's no money in it.

(06-15-2020 01:29 PM)BruceMcF Wrote:  

(06-15-2020 10:34 AM)mturn017 Wrote:  ODU's last full year in CAA 2012-2013 travel costs 2.2M. Most recent available in CUSA 2018-2019 travel costs of 3.9M.

http://www.apa.virginia.gov/reports/ODU_NCAA-2013.pdf

http://www.apa.virginia.gov/reports/OldD...AA2019.pdf

It seems you can buy quite a bit of complaining with $1.7m.

Who's complaining?