By Mark R. Killingsworth

Last October, Rutgers athletics was on a roll. The management team posted a video which showed them strutting through the athletics center, lauding the ribbon-cutting for new athletics facilities, and proclaiming, "It's happening!" -- even though unspecified naysayers "said it couldn't be done."



Two weeks later, Rutgers President Robert Barchi told the school's governing boards that the program had a new financial "road map," aimed at eliminating the program's chronic -- and substantial -- deficit spending. Barchi pledged that athletics "must become revenue-positive and financially self-sufficient, and this now-public financial plan is evidence of our University's commitment to that goal."



The short-term news looked good. The road map projected a total athletics deficit of only $23 million for the 2016-17 fiscal year -- $15.6 million less than the previous year's budget-busting deficit.



So the deficit is shrinking, and athletics will be subsidy-free by 2021, when Rutgers receives its first payout as a full member of the Big Ten?



But wait! On further review, it turns out that the deficit was bigger than the figure in the road map -- much bigger. In fact, as shown in the program's January 2018 report to the NCAA, in 2016-17 the program actually received a total subsidy of $33.1 million from direct institutional support and student fee allocations. This is over 40 percent larger than the figure in the road map.



And that's not all -- because even with this much greater total subsidy, the program's revenues still fell short of its expenses to the tune of $2.3 million, making a total deficit of $35.4 million.



And even that is not the end of the story. Among other things, the program reported that it received a total of $14.3 million in "other operating revenue." However, as I learned from an Open Public Records Act (OPRA) request, most of this wasn't revenue at all. Rather, $11.9 million of this was actually "loan proceeds against future B1G earnings."



So the real deficit for 2016-17 can now stand up and be counted: it comes to a total of $35.4 million plus $11.9 million, or $47.3 million -- the largest deficit in the history of Rutgers athletics. Despite Barchi's oft-expressed pious hopes for athletics self-sufficiency, the program has now blown through a grand total of $193.1 million in deficit spending since he arrived in New Brunswick.



If you think this is bad ... there's worse. From the university's response to another OPRA request, I learned that Rutgers currently has an outstanding total of $33.13 million in "internal debt" -- the last of which won't be paid off until 2030.



It is now painfully obvious that Rutgers athletics is wholly incapable of meeting its own financial targets. As one particularly telling example, the "road map" of last October projected 2016-17 expenditures of $88.1 million, vs. actual expenditures of $99.2 million shown in the NCAA report.



It is also painfully obvious that, even with full-membership Big Ten revenue, Rutgers athletics is going to have deficits, and need enormous subsidies, for years to come -- not only to cover its operating costs, but also to pay back its loans. Barchi's hope to the contrary is sheer fantasy.



The members of Rutgers' Board of Governors have shown that, collectively, they are either too ignorant or too timid to do anything to restore even the most modest degree of fiscal sanity to Rutgers athletics: for them, anything goes. Apparently, they don't understand, or don't care, that athletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.



Gov. Chris Christie did nothing to encourage athletic fiscal sanity, either. He famously declared that Rutgers spending more money on athletics "makes sense."



However, there's a new sheriff in Trenton who may not be so sympathetic to such nonsense. For starters, Gov. Phil Murphy could encourage Christie's appointees to the board to step aside, and could find replacements with both a brain and a backbone. An essential second step would be to appoint an independent blue-ribbon commission to conduct a full-scale review of the program's finances and make a report to the public.



The future of the university hangs in the balance.

Mark R. Killingsworth is professor of economics at Rutgers University.

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