Back in June, Bill Moos and the athletic department of Nebraska did its best to try to predict the potential economic hit of possibly losing part of the 2020 football season due to COVID-19.
The NU’s third-year athletic director and his staff could never have predicted how devastating the impact would ultimately be when the Big Ten Conference announced this week that the season would be postponed until 2021.
During a performance on the radio program Husker Sports Network, Sports Nightly, on Thursday night, Moos provided some digging figures to show how substantial a battle that seven home football games would be this fall.
When the Nebraska athletics department initially cut its budget and eliminated 17 positions, including some senior staff, back in June, it did so with the projection of a roughly $ 12-15 million deficit.
Well, Moos said NU Athletics only looked to lose more than $ 100 million.
Even more, Moos said the collateral financial damage expected for the City of Lincoln this season no fall football would be around $ 300 million.
“There are a lot of companies, a lot of jobs, a lot of families that are going to be affected,” Moos said. “That weighs heavily on me, and it weighs heavily on all the administrators at the University of Nebraska.”
Moos said each home football game in Nebraska was worth about $ 12 million, and that did not even factor in the extra income earned from the Huskers’ television contract through the Big Ten and other media partners.
With every hope of games officially out the window this fall, Moos stressed the importance of playing at least one part-season this spring to receive at least a portion of the annual television revenue, which is now $ 50 million per school for a whole season tops.
Moos said his staff had been together for some time now, including when he spoke on Thursday night, to develop a new budget plan and thought they “had a solid sense of the dilemma we face.”
However, Moos acknowledged: “This is a horrible exercise.”
Another consequence of the lost fall season that could not be counted in dollars was the mental toll taken on student-athlete athletes from Nebraska. After months of preparing for this league in their respective sports, many Husker athletes are now left wondering if they will get the chance to play all of them in 2020-21.
“For now, those dreams are shattered,” Moos said. “It will take everything we have to make sure we embrace them, love them, take care of them and get through this together.”
Moos’ interview had a gloomy tune from the beginning, but he made sure to close with pep talk not only for the coaches, athletes and staff members of Nebraska, but for the people of the entire state who are equally affected by it. lost 2020 season.
“This is a great state, and we are going to arm ourselves and we will go through this whole march like we did in the aftermath of the floods that took place earlier last year,” Moos said. ‘We will get there, and it will make us stronger. We will come out better in the end, but I have a strong, strong concern and feelings for the people who will be affected both in our department at the University, in Lincoln, and throughout the state of Nebraska. “
