I started attending the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1994, a couple months shy of my 18th birthday, and began reporting about my school soon thereafter as a staff writer with The Minnesota Daily. That bled into a quarter-century at the Star Tribune, with the U as a focal point at many stages along the way.
My hope is that those credentials make me qualified to say this: There has never been a time in those 30 years when the Gophers athletic department hasn’t been in some sort of financial crisis.
This idea was cemented a little over two decades ago, and little has happened since to change it.
On April 4, 2002, I helped cover the Gophers men’s hockey team’s NCAA semifinal victory over Michigan at Xcel Energy Center. Around the same time, the Star Tribune learned that then-University President Mark Yudof intended to cut three athletic programs in a cost-saving measure: men’s and women’s golf plus men’s gymnastics.
The NCAA men’s gymnastics meet had also started on April 4. The next morning, my former sports editor Glen Crevier called me up and asked: How fast can you get to Oklahoma, site of the meet, where the Gophers men’s gymnastics team was competing and was suddenly very much in the news.
I was 25 then, not yet married and more than a decade away from being a dad, and so the answer was: I can probably leave in a few hours.
I hastily called the Star Tribune’s travel agent (we had such a thing back then), and she booked me on a $1,400 flight for that afternoon (we had that kind of money and then some in 2002, years before the Internet turned our business model upside down). I remember doing a load of laundry, printing out some stories for background to read on the plane, and heading to Norman, Okla.
Arriving that night, I found several athletes and Gophers coach Fred Roethlisberger in the heat of Day 2 of a three-day competition. Roethlisberger, who had only heard the news that his program was on the chopping block while at the NCAA meet, demanded to know why I was there and said some unprintable things about the Star Tribune and my sports editor’s decision to send me to ask about the potential cuts.
“I guarantee you we will be back competing in the NCAAs next year,” he said not long after I arrived on Friday in a loud, brief and animated interview. “If you want to write something, put that in there.”
In a separate interview Saturday, he reiterated that nothing had been settled. “Yudof has floated trial balloons before,” Roethlisberger said. “There’s no reason to think this will stick any more than anything else.”
As I cobbled together reports that weekend, including a long cover story for Sunday’s paper that I finished Saturday night as I watched my alma mater defeat Maine in overtime to win its first NCAA men’s hockey title in 23 years — on a tiny press box TV in Oklahoma, not live at the X — I had no idea just how right Roethlisberger was.
Sure enough and soon enough, a “Save Gopher Sports” fundraising effort was launched. They raised the requisite money needed to stave off cuts to all three programs — $2.7 million, which might not even buy you a starting quarterback at some schools these days — and order was restored.
The men’s gymnastics program survived another 18 years until it met its ultimate fate along with men’s indoor track and men’s tennis. Those programs were unable in 2020 to survive Title IX compliance, tight budgets and the convenient cover of Covid-19.
That’s not to say there wasn’t a real financial crisis four years ago at the U, which gets back to the original point: There’s always a financial crisis at the U.
All of which brings us to the latest incarnation: How in the world the Gophers are going to find $21 million a year in their budget to pay athletes starting in the 2025-26 schoolyear, something I talked about on Thursday’s Daily Delivery podcast.
The problem again is real, part of a pace of change in college sports over the last few years that would be laughable if it wasn’t so exhausting. A rigged system has come undone, and now the bills are due.
Money from bloated TV contracts and big-time college football will pay for some of it, Gophers AD Mark Coyle told the U’s Board of Regents on Wednesday. He only hinted at the rest, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“As we face these new challenges, ideally when you look at our 22 sports programs, we need to focus on what we provide our student athletes,” Coyle said. “I think it’s going to look different.”
Translation: The programs that don’t make money should either prepare to compete against Midwest schools during the nonconference season or prepare for elimination.
The programs that do make money, with football at the top of the food chain, should prepare for a college athletics arms race conducted in the open, unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
An unofficial hierarchy of haves, have-somes and have-nots will form, and programs will know exactly where they stand when they see the budget (or if they don’t see one at all).
Roethlisberger, 81 now, would probably tell me that such a thing has always existed. Some of it will just be more plain to see as priorities solidify, and the rest of it will be softened by how we describe it (we don’t call them non-revenue sports these days. They’re Olympic sports).
This crisis will pass and get folded into How We Do Business, and another one will take its place. Maybe all the subsequent fires will feel bigger and harder to put out because that’s life these days.
But through it all remember this: None of this is new, even if it feels different.
