Postponing Football Could Impact All Other Sports At CU Boulder
BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4) - Administrators and conference officials are discussing what to do with the upcoming college football season. Concerns around student safety are clashing with the multi-million dollar decision to cancel or postpone the season.
"When you look at finances in college athletics and especially at the University of Colorado, football is the money making sport," said Brian Howell who covers CU Athletics for the Boulder Daily Camera and BuffZone.com. "All the other sports depend on that football money in order to operate. None of them make money, in fact they all lose quite a bit of money and they need that football money."
Howell says last year's revenue for CU football was $43.4 million dollars. A delay or cancellation for the football season is expected from the Pac-12 on Tuesday. The move is likely to follow the Big 10 conference.
"It's huge for CU, there's a big loss financially from all these schools. It could mean layoffs, furloughs, we could see sports getting cut, there's a number of things have to be sorted out," Howell said.
The decision to cancel is largely about health concerns, even as players say they'd like to play.
"There's so many avenues where it can spread that it just makes it dangerous across the board. The liability is very scary. There's a lot of reasons to not play, and the overall health and safety, I think it's important not to play," Howell said.
It's likely the decision about football will be to buy conferences time instead of an outright cancellation of the season for the entire school year.
"For the general safety of things I think people ought to just shut down and maybe look at repositioning for the spring," Howell said.
