The Daily Emerald on spiraling deficits for baseball

The jersey is not buried at home plate. They dug there and did not find it. From what I was told, there are two buried jerseys, and that's all I'm going to say on this subject.

Favorite quote in the article? Horton saying: "We were supposed to be in Omaha by now". Gee, ya think so?

The Article linked in this post says it all...  Not one team in Division 1 makes a profit!  LSU is the closest and they were within $10K in 2006 (They average over 7K fans).  It would be interesting to see new numbers ran and see where everyone stacks up now.  I am just glad that there is College Baseball to watch every Spring, especially at Oregon State!  Go Beavs!

That's BS, though. Every article you ever read about how sports are money losers are based on data that are wildly misleading. The budgets rarely include:

1 - Licensing. OSU makes over a million dollars in just the licensing of Beaver gear. And that doesn't include:
2 - Garment Sales. OSU also sells a lot of gear directly through the bookstore, internet and other venues.
3 - Concessions. It varies from school to school whether concessions and parking are including in the revenues. But none of the numbers you've seen include the large payments that Coke and Pepsi pay colleges to be the exclusive vendor on campus - much of the value of which comes from the sports venues.
4 - Scholarships. The marginal cost of OSU educating one more baseball player is negligible. But the university charges the athletic department full out-of-state tuition for the service. That's $27k per athlete.
5 - Venue Advertising. This is usually not included in the budget, as the venue belongs to the school, not the athletic department. In minor league baseball, this is usually roughly a third of the revenues.

Baseball is still a money loser almost everywhere, but it is certainly making money at Texas and LSU and is probably within shouting distance of being profitable at OSU. But we shouldn't mind a modest deficit - the exposure the team brings to OSU is worth much more.

And that's the real problem at UO. It's not just that the baseball team is hemorrhaging money. It's that almost all the coverage of the team is negative. Just losing games wouldn't be bad - it still puts the name out there. But spending millions AND losing AND having terrible attendance just reinforces every negative statement ever made about UO.

So let me get this straight.  The problem isn't that the team is losing, the program is a financial black hole, attendance is pathetic and none of the promises made by Kilkenny and Giansante for resurrecting the program have been kept.

The problem is bad press.

ok.

If you are the Pres. of UO, yes.  The biggest reason why schools have athletic departments is because it draws attention to the school, attracting donors and students alike.  UO would happily tolerate a $6 million/year loss if it brought that much "advertising".  But as things stands, it doesn't.

It's been documented that *uck "attendance" numbers routinely include game day staff, security, concessions workers and on-field coaches and competitors.  No joke.

That's common for almost everyone in the industry