Bowling Green State Eliminates Baseball

Two days ago, Bowling Green State announced that it was eliminating baseball effective immediately.  Recently, I analyzed Old Dominion's decision to eliminate wrestling and I concluded that it would reduce athletic department deficits and help the university with Title IX compliance.

Given this decision by BGSU, I thought I would do the same for the baseball program as I did for the ODU wrestling program.

Note:  I am not including tuition revenue of the student-athletes as revenue to the baseball program as I contend that tuition revenue is revenue generated by the academic units, not the athletic unit.  As you may guess, economists are not unified on this.  Go figure!!
Then again, I am not adjusting for student fees that account for nearly 50% of BGSU's athletic department total operating revenues, nor am I adjusting for the 5% to 13% Direct Institutional Support (both can be thought of as subsidies for the athletic department) that contributed to the athletic department's total operating revenues.

My takeaway:  dropping baseball 1.) reduces the athletic department's fiscal year deficit, but 2.) does not meet the Title IX "prong 1" test, though it helps a little.

Here are the athletic department financial numbers for the baseball program for the 2016/17 to 2018/19 fiscal years.  (Athletic Department financial numbers were acquired via public records requests).

Bowling Green	FY	Total Op.	Total Op.	Surplus/	Scholarship	Surplus/Deficit
State University		Revenue	Expenses	Deficit	Expenses	w/o Student Aid
Baseball	2017	$55,000	$746,007	-$691,007	$239,865	-$451,142
Baseball	2018	$74,433	$766,272	-$691,839	$266,800	-$425,039
Baseball	2019	$80,259	$775,016	-$694,757	$272,150	-$422,607

As you can see, baseball generates lower total operating revenues than total operating expenses, resulting in a fairly consistent deficit around $700K.  Even ignoring the scholarship expenses, which are not an economic cost, results in BGSU having a deficit of over $400K per fiscal year.

Using the EADA data, I looked up for each fiscal year the following:
Full-time Equivalent Male Counts and Female Counts; and Male student aid and Female Student Aid.

I calculate the following (in terms of percentages):

Name	FY	Male%	Female%	Male-Aid%	Female-Aid%	Difference
Bowling Green	2017	43.18%	56.82%	61.55%	38.45%	18.37%
Bowling Green	2018	43.21%	56.79%	64.17%	35.83%	20.96%
Bowling Green	2019	43.93%	56.07%	60.44%	39.56%	16.50%

Since the Title IX "prong 1" test states that universities are in compliance if they are +/- 1% of the ratio of full time equivalent males to male athletic aid, and BGSU is +18.37%, this means that BGSU is not meeting this test, BUT it does not mean that BGSU is not in compliance.

BGSU can make an argument that eliminating baseball is meeting Title IX "prong 2" now.