In 2018, with his school facing the possibility of cutting staff to make up a huge shortfall in state funding, Northern Illinois athletic director Sean Frazier added a football game at Florida State to the Huskies’ schedule.

The road trip came with a $1.6 million payout to NIU.

“Florida State, essentially, saved people's jobs,” Frazier said.

Guarantee games, or buy games, are essential to many athletic departments that field Division I football teams but have far smaller budgets than those at Power Five schools.
This season, 39 major college football schools have scheduled a total of 49 buy games worth an estimated $65 million. If coronavirus disruptions cause Power Five teams to play more or only conference games, it could leave huge holes in the athletic budgets of schools already stretched thin.

The largest payout for a one-game deal with no return this season reportedly is $1.9 million by Auburn to Massachusetts. UMass, an independent, has a $10 million budget for football. The Auburn game scheduled for Nov. 14 offsets much of the expenses for the rest of the Minutemen’s schedule, athletic director Ryan Bamford said.

“If we lose that and we're playing 11 other games, then it's a major impact,” he said.

The pandemic has made everything about the coming college football season uncertain. There are some promising signs as states lift restrictions meant to curb the spread of the virus. University presidents are sending hopeful messages to students about plans to have campuses up and running in the fall. All plans are tentative these days.

Former AD isn’t the one who negotiated football contracts or scheduled games.

The former AD is the one who signed off on these contracts as he was responsible for the entire athletics program. He may have delegated this duty to an assistant, but he should have known the dollar amount of every contract. For example, he had to know that football would be receiving only about $650,000 for the Purdue game a few seasons ago, because basketball was getting a return home game from them. Ark. State received $1 million for a game at Va. Tech in 2011. That was nine years ago. Troy is making $1.4 million for traveling to Knoxville this season. Akron made at least $1.2 million for its win over Northwestern two seasons ago and $1.3 million for playing at South Carolina. Kent made $1.9 million for the game at Auburn last season and $1.5 million from Arizona State. Middle Tennessee earned $1.55 million for the game at Iowa last year. The list is endless of the group of five schools getting paid. Could be that those schools had a person who knew how to negotiate deals?

I was watching a Clemson game against I believe Wofford on TV and one of the commentators mentioned that there is some kind of arrangement between Clemson and all of the South Carolina FCS schools (Citadel, Furman, SC State, Wofford etc.) for the Tigers to rotate playing them at home for a payout to help support their programs and fill out Clemson's schedule.

Was a passing comment so I don't know how valid it is but I thought that was a nice setup if really the case.

I think at one time tOSU had some kind of rotating set up with the MAC but don't know if that had any financial arrangements or if that was done by a team by team/year by year basis.

Basketball attendance has tanked so bad in the last few years. Student enthusiasm is nil. Even in December, an opponent like Purdue should have meant 7-9k in the arena. We didn't even have 3. We'd always been considered more of a basketball school, so it's surprising that fb has sustained better in recent years of declining attendance/interest everywhere. that said, football has been more successful.

Agreed but Purdue was a bad night. Students were gone and high school basketball is played on Tuesday night. On any given Tuesday night, there are more people in high school gyms watching their local teams play TVC ball than in the Convo.

Unfortunately, money games will be harder to come by as the "P" conferences add in-conference games and will want to play more OOC games vs other "P"s to boost their resumes for playoff reasons. Except for coaches who have sentimental reasons for playing a G5 team, such as Nick Saban with Kent, it'll increasingly become a seller's market.

Not sure but this is a great site to compare OU to the MAC and D1. Very neat graphs.

http://cafidatabase.knightcommission.org/fbs/mac/ohio-uni...

Good catch BTC, I too noticed that figure. This is probably a stupid question but what exactly is our "related debt" as listed in that graph? In 2018 it was listed as $13,377,846, whereas in 2016 it was $5,497,772 and in 2013 it was listed as $2,853,396. My other question is what exactly is "total annual debt service, leases and rental fees on athletic facilities" as listed in that graph? In 2013 whatever it was amount to about -0-. By 2018 that number had climbed to well north of $2,000,000. Again, please pardon my ignorance but what facilities are we renting, leasing or otherwise paying on some mortgage or bonds? Again all of this relates to only athletics.

And Grover

Well forgive my ignorance here, but if athletics has to use student fees to help cover operating costs, how much of that money goes towards those kinds of costs-paying the university to rent/use athletic-based facilities?

Or is the income/expense for the department arranged where certain funds are restricted to pay for certain expenses?

Student fees don't subsidize athletics only for a portion of those fees to come back to another university income source a la facility rentals?

I don't understand Grover.

That was converted to Classrooms and meeting Rooms.

Ping and Walter are not considered Athletics facilities. Ping especially is a campus rec building and Walter is managed and scheduled by campus rec. in fact Campus Rec uses Walter more than Athletics.