Within the college sports industry, the word for now about a 2020-21 football season is optimism amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Somehow, some way, at some point, games will be played.

Right beneath the surface, however, is the knowledge that it might not be normal. Or, that it might not be at all.

At stake is at least $4.1 billion in fiscal-year revenue for the athletics departments at just the 50-plus public schools in the Power Five conferences — an average of more than $78 million per school — a USA TODAY Sports analysis of schools’ financial reports to the NCAA shows.

That’s more than 60% of these schools’ combined total annual operating revenues, based on amounts reported for the 2019 fiscal year. These estimates do not take into account potential impacts on student fees or money from schools’ general funds, both of which likely would be reduced if students cannot return to campus as usual for the fall semester. Even within the Power Five, there are schools that receive significant amounts from those sources.

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Separate, but related, is the financial effect of football games on schools’ local areas. This matters to public schools, which always are eager to show their economic impacts to taxpayers and legislators, and it adds up to billions more.

All of this is “why they’re going to try their damnedest to have a season of 12 games, regardless of what months” in which it occurs, said Dan Rascher, a University of San Francisco sport management professor who has been an expert witness on the economics of major-college athletics for plaintiffs in antitrust cases against the NCAA. “The question is whether they will get the same revenues for the games.”

A canceled season would entirely erase income from tickets; postseason games; game-appearance guarantees, which sometimes can be significant, even for a Power Five school; and various game-day sales. Payments that are connected to the right to buy tickets or obtain preferred seating; TV, radio and digital rights and the value of marketing and sponsorship deals also would be heavily impacted, according to a range of school and industry experts.

Athletics departments would have expense savings in an array of areas specific to football — the costs of staging games, paying guarantees, travel, meals and snacks beyond basic board plans, equipment, medical services and bonuses to coaches who also might be taking pay cuts. That’s about $520 million. Also, if there is no football season, at least in the fall, it is likely there would be not be any other sports, so those operational costs would be saved.

But the net outcome works out to a loss of more than $3.3 billion, and there would be reason for schools to be worried about future impacts.

“This is way beyond anybody’s imagination,” Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione said during a teleconference last week. “I was telling somebody the other day that I feel like we are living one of those movies. … We’re enthralled by the storyline, the cinematography, the drama and whatever emotions get invoked. Then the movie would end and you would get up and walk out of the theater and realize it was quite a story but it was just a movie. This one, we are living day to day and we still don’t know exactly if we are a fourth of the way through it, halfway through it, three-fourths of the way through it.”

Todd Fischer is a senior vice president with GMR Marketing, an agency that represents companies including Hershey, Nissan and Comcast in their college-sports advertising and school-level sponsorships. He sketched out scenarios book-ended by two extremes:

The good: “Everybody’s taking an optimistic approach to what still may be able to come to fruition with football and other fall and winter sports … If football comes back … there are going to be a lot of people that haven’t been running advertising as heavily or have had other sponsorships reduced because of cancellations that (will be) looking to invest. … College football could be a major beneficiary of that.”

The bad: With the cancellations of men’s basketball conference tournaments and the NCAA tournament in March, a football season cancellation would mean “a full canceled year, almost, of those sponsorship deals … and in the absence of sponsorable assets and activities, the advertising dollars move out of that industry and would be reallocated in other places,” Fischer said.

The financial impact of a canceled or reduced football season would be felt beyond campuses. On average, an Alabama home football game has a “visitor expenditure impact” of about $19.6 million in the Tuscaloosa area, according to the most recent annual study of the university’s overall economic impact by the Center for Business and Economic Research in Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business. The Crimson Tide are scheduled to play seven home games this season.

But no one know many of those games will be played, or how many people will be allowed — or willing — to attend.

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USA TODAY Sports’ model for effects on athletics department is based on an examination of certain revenue and expense categories, as defined by the NCAA for the purpose of schools’ annual financial reports to the association for the 2019 fiscal year. USA TODAY Sports compiled those documents in partnership with Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

The NCAA asks schools to report totals for each revenue and expense category. Within each category, schools are asked to report amounts for each sport. But they also have the option of reporting certain amounts as not being attributed to any specific team.

On the revenue side, some of this is straightforward for football — for example, ticket sales and guarantees. Schools’ shares of their conferences’ bowl revenue became clearer in the reporting for 2019, a combined total of more than $280 million.

Other revenues are more nuanced because schools, for a variety of reasons, report large portions of them as not being attributed to any specific team. Based on interviews with school and industry experts, USA TODAY’s model includes assigning 75% of schools’ media rights and 70% of their contribution totals to football. It also includes assigning 50% of schools’ revenue from advertisements, sponsorships, royalties and licensing to football.

Some football expenses would be eliminated if the season is canceled, including guarantee payments, travel, the cost of staging home games and going to bowl games. Based on the interviews with school and industry experts, USA TODAY Sports’ model includes 50% cuts in spending on extra meals, equipment and medical services and a 10% in cut in coach and staff pay.

If schools operate entirely in a distance-learning environment for the fall semester, an athletics department’s spending on scholarships might not have to include all mandatory fees or full room-and-board costs. But many athletics department officials are expecting little to no change in other scholarship costs.

“That is a commitment that we’re not planning on taking away scholarship money from any student-athlete,” Iowa AD Gary Barta said last week in a teleconference.

Here’s what some of this looks like:

Ticket sales: Many Power Five schools play seven of their 12 games at home, and most of the largest stadiums in U.S. sports are homes to college teams. According to information the NCAA compiled last year from school athletics web sites, there are 18 stadiums with seating capacities of more than 80,000.

In fiscal 2019, 19 schools reported football ticket revenue of at least $20 million, including 11 at more than $30 million. Ohio State led the way at nearly $51 million.

Altogether, Power Five public schools reported about $1 billion in football ticket revenue. It is possible, of course, that some customers will not seek immediate refunds, or they may be willing to treat money already paid for 2020 tickets as a donation.

Media rights and sponsorships: In some ways these are separate, but in some ways they are connected. As a result, schools can end up reporting their media rights and sponsorship revenues to the NCAA in different ways.

For example, for fiscal 2019:

►Wisconsin reported total media rights revenue of $56 million and attributed nearly $46 million to football. It also reported total advertising/sponsorship/royalty revenue of more than $13 million and attributed just over $500,000 to football.

►Nebraska reported nearly $28 million in total advertising/sponsorship/royalty revenue and attributed more than $16 million to football.

The standalone part of football media rights is almost entirely from conference TV deals that produce revenue shared by each school in a given conference. If there are no live games to show, conferences aren’t going to get paid in full, if at all.

Matters get interconnected in school-level multi-media and marketing rights deals and shoe-and-apparel contracts. A multimedia and marketing rights (MMR) agreement typically bundles local radio broadcasts of all sports events, coaches’ TV shows and advertising and sponsorship across an entire athletics department.

Schools’ local media-and-marketing deals get as much as 85% of their value from football, according to AJ Maestas, the CEO of Navigate, a Chicago-based firm that specializes in college and professional sports rights valuations. Those deals, as well as shoe-and-apparel deals, often contemplate the prospect of payment-adjustment negotiations if games are not played for reasons beyond the school’s control. Companies buying in-stadium advertising or the opportunity to conduct game-day promotions at Power Five schools aren’t paying for access to sparse crowds.

A pivotal company for college sports MMR deals is Learfield IMG College, which has such arrangements with roughly 200 schools. Many of those contracts are long term, so the company and the schools have powerful incentives to step carefully around diminishing the value of any one season.

“These are trying times and we’re all in it together and the early conversations we’ve had with our AD partners have been conversations of understanding and fairness, and I’d expect that’s going to continue,” Learfield IMG College president and CEO Cole Gahagan said. “We’re still early on in this process, so we haven’t seen anything either empirically or anecdotally yet that tells us that there’s been a significant impact to the MMR business, but we’re not naïve to expect that changes aren’t coming.”

Because of schools’ freedom to categorize these revenues in different ways and because it's unclear how MMR and shoe-and-apparel companies will approach their deals with schools, USA TODAY used a conservative approach in modeling these areas for a canceled football season. It came out at just over $1.2 billion in media revenue and just over $300 million in advertising/sponsorship/royalty revenue.

Contributions: The NCAA’s reporting form defines contributions as including “amounts received above face value for tickets.” That means this category is intended to be the one in which schools report amounts paid for the right to either purchase tickets or obtain preferred seating.

At most schools, athletics department officials say, this amount is heavily driven by customers wanting this for football games — although there are exceptions. For fiscal 2019, Louisville reported that more than $19 million of its nearly $38 million in contributions was attributable to men’s basketball.

Because payments to booster clubs may provide ticket-related benefits across multiple sports, many schools say the greatest portion of their contribution total is not attributable to any one sport.

But these figures are illustrative of the practical realities: For 2019, Auburn attributed $29 million of $35 million to football; Washington nearly $20 million of $31 million; Michigan nearly $29 million of $35 million.

As with ticket payments, it is possible schools will be able to hang on to at least some of this money, but by USA TODAY’s estimate and the schools’ financial reports, another $1 billion would be imperiled.

And the peril is real.

“There’s absolutely a possibility that (a football season) may not happen and that we may not ready for college football or any of our fall sports across college athletics or professional sports,” Northwestern AD Jim Phillips said in an interview late last week with WBBM Chicago Newsradio’s George Ofman.

“But I always try to stay on the optimistic side and also to try to remain hopeful. … You’re thinking about a variety of models — 12-game season, 10-game season, eight-game season. When does it start? When does it finish? Do you play just conference games? … But then you’re also waiting for the clearance of — most importantly — when it is safe to resume.”

Contributing: Ryan Aber, The Oklahoman; Travis Hines, the Ames (Iowa) Tribune.