Monmouth would rather drop to Division III than pay athletes

WEST LONG BRANCH - The March Madness hangover still lingered, the NCAA's monthlong, $1-billion bender having just toasted a champion at the Final Four two nights earlier, as a cross section from an athletic program not drunk on television dollars gathered to debate the financially skewed landscape of college sports.

Inside Monmouth University's student center Wednesday night, Jersey Shore native Jack Ford -- the attorney, Emmy Award winner and all-purpose television talent  -- delivered a lecture titled "The Politics of College Athletics: Is it All About the Money?"

While the students, athletes, coaches, administrators and community members likely already knew the answer, the whole interactive discussion was rather sobering.

With the NCAA Tournament, the greatest sports marketing boondoggle this side of the Super Bowl, sparking the annual debate about whether student-athletes should share in the riches beyond receiving a free education, and the lawsuit by attorney Jeffrey Kessler that seeks to blow up the amateur sports model moving forward, these are uncertain times for mid-major programs like Monmouth.

So what if the NCAA is forced into a free-market system, where a player is paid what the market deems he's worth?

"If that happens, we're out of the business," Monmouth athletic director Marilyn McNeil said. "We're out of the business. We become a Division III program. There will be no scholarships."

Think about that for a moment. An athletic program with a $57 million arena that houses a men's basketball team that's beaten six teams from high-major conferences over the past two seasons, and with a new football stadium set to open in September, would be reduced to relative insignificance.

And Monmouth isn't alone, with virtually every school at this level facing a similar fate while the Power Five conferences wage financial war trying to secure the best players available.

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"What you're seeing is a move towards haves and have-nots, and hopefully that movement will be thwarted in some fashion," said Ford after much of the crowd had departed.

"If it comes down to, 'You will get whatever the market says you're worth to come play at Monmouth,' it will actually drive places like Monmouth down to Division III. And a lot of people say, 'We don't care.' "

And why would they care?

They're already addicted to the television cash, with only about 20 or so high-major athletic programs actually turning a profit even with the lucrative infusion of greenbacks. It's a given that programs at Monmouth's level are not self-sufficient.

School like Rutgers, which ran a $38.5 million deficit last year and ranks among the nation's most heavily subsidized athletic programs, are banking on the big bucks the Big Ten Network is projected to provide to balance the budget, with the lure of that cash flow when they become fully vested members in 2021 pushing facility upgrades and skyrocketing coaches' salaries.

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"The television industry, especially cable, is changing," Ford cautioned. "I saw ESPN lost something like 13 percent of their subscribers last year. That's a big number to lose. You're counting on them paying their monthly bill to allow you to pay to get the rights to this event.

"Now all of the sudden people are doing their skinny bundles and watching things on their phones or watching Netflix, and what looked like $48 million a year suddenly goes back to $15 million a year, and you're in the same place you were before. 'How do we pay our bills?' And actually you're not in the same place because you have the same bills and you have less revenue coming in."

The first step toward paying student-athletes came in 2015 with the NCAA's cost of attendance measure, which approved payments to scholarship athletes for expenses incurred while attending school,

"It's very, very scary," McNeil said. "Just the whole cost of attendance issue. When that got passed we said we wouldn't do it, and then the conference (MAAC) voted that they would do it, so we had to come up with $70,000. 'We have to do that? Are you kidding me?' I had no problem giving cost of attendance to kids that were needy. But not every one of our kids is needy. We’ve had a couple of kids driving a Mercedes onto the campus. And we have other kids who there's no way they could afford a car. But to just do it carte blanche. Are we really thinking about what that really means?

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"People from those big conferences won't talk to us because we want to get back to the basics. Let's play for the love of sports. Let's give the kids their scholarships, but they don't need more than that. They can't keep spending money. They don't have an unlimited sum of money. They've lost the whole value system there."

If someone from a Power Five conference happens to read all this, they'll get a good chuckle out of it. They can afford to, before going and cashing their latest television check.

And maybe it's all for the best if schools like Monmouth end up going in their own direction, as far away as possible from the television cash cow that schools are increasingly beholden to, praying that the flow from the teat never runs dry.

Staff Writer Stephen Edelson is an Asbury Park Press columnist. Email: sedelson@gannettnj.com