Old Dominion Recommends Dropping Wrestling

Last month, Andy Schwarz tweeted about Old Dominion University's (ODU) decision to drop wrestling.

I looked at the Old Dominion study that was used to justify the termination of ODU's wrestling program. https://t.co/UGrhTBtuy7

Even though the report asserts ODU is likely to face under-enrollment problems, there was no assessment of ...

— Andy Schwarz (@andyhre) April 5, 2020

My takeaway is the following:  dropping wrestling achieves two major goals - reducing a program making a financial loss and allows ODU to be compliant with Title IX.

ODU is adding women's volleyball in an effort to be in compliance with Title IX, because ODU does not currently meet the first "prong" of the options to be in compliance with Title IX, but by adding women's volleyball ODU is in compliance with the second "prong" of the Title IX compliance test. (The three "prongs" are laid out on page 6 of the ODU document linked here).  If ODU's athletic department cuts $250,000 in male scholarships and adds $250,000 in female scholarships then they will be in compliance using the first "prong" of the Title IX compliance test.

Since they are unable to drop a women's program due to Title IX requirements and ODU is unwilling to drop men's football, men's basketball and women's basketball, what must be done to meet the Title IX compliance test?  The three men's sports that could achieve this result are baseball, soccer and wrestling.  The author states that ODU baseball and ODU men's soccer are competitive for Conference USA conference championships, so that leaves wrestling - which the document states is not competitive for Conference USA conference championships.

So, is this accurate?  From the numbers I have, it seems to be.
Dropping wrestling:
1.) drops a program that is incurring a financial deficit to the athletic department.

Here are the wrestling programs total operating revenues, total operating expenses and surplus (+) or deficit (-) for fiscal years 2017, 2018 and 2019 that ODU provides to the NCAA.
 

FY	Total Op. Rev.	Total Op. Exp	Surplus/Deficit
2017	$53,148	$962,047	-$908,899
2018	$53,647	$941,218	-$887,571
2019	$113,546	$1,021,456	-$907,910

You will notice the wrestling program results in a deficit each of the last three fiscal years.  Yet, Andy raises a great point, regarding if scholarships (which are an accounting cost, but not an economic cost) are taken into account. 

Dropping wrestling:
2.) helps the athletic department reach "prong" 1 of the Title IX requirements (along with the addition of adding the women's volleyball program). 

FY	Student Aid
2017	$332,369
2018	$338,629
2019	$356,140

Since I have the student aid data for the ODU wrestling program during this time period, I subtracted out the scholarship costs to see if this would turn the deficit above into a surplus.  It does not.  I have also added the number of wrestling participants and the number of scholarships for the wrestling program over those three fiscal years as well.

FY	Surplus/Deficit w/o Student Aid	Partici- pants	Scholarships
2017	-$576,530	35	11.04
2018	-$548,942	36	10.28
2019	-$551,770	35	10.41