August 10, 2020

When Football Is a Money Loser, Suddenly the Players Come First

Exciting MAC action in the Before Times.Kyle Okita/CSM via ZUMA

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A major college conference has canceled its fall sports:

The Mid-American Conference postponed its football season, the conference announced Saturday, becoming the first Football Bowl Subdivision league to decide not to hold games this fall because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

….“The decision is grounded in the core values of the Conference that prioritize student-athlete well-being, an area the MAC has traditionally taken a leadership role,” Commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said in a statement.

That’s a breath of fresh air, isn’t it? It’s good to see a college sports conference putting its athletes first even if it means losing—

Many MAC schools rely on the revenue generated through guarantee games — when a Power Five school pays another program to play it during the nonconference schedule. Most of these games have been canceled because all of the Power Five leagues have chosen to play one or zero nonconference games this season.

Ah, I see. Without any of these guarantee games, football suddenly becomes a money loser for MAC schools. And just as suddenly, the well-being of the players becomes paramount and the season is canceled. Got it.

UPDATE: The Big Ten has canceled its football season too. I’m sure all the other dominoes will now fall as well.

With no fans in the stands, I imagine that football is a money loser even for Power Five schools. That probably made it a lot easier to do the right thing.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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