With the NCAA men’s basketball tournament canceled, the NCAA could lose more than $550 million dollars in revenue, money that is distributed to its member institutions through their conferences.

However, Clemson athletic director Dan Radakovich told The Clemson Insider on Wednesday that situation might not be as dire as people think.

“The NCAA has significant reserves that they are looking at but may have to use a line of credit in order to have some kind of distribution to the member schools for sports sponsorships, scholarships, etc.,” he said. “It is not clear yet what that will be, but I think it is a safe bet it will not be what it would have been under a normal circumstance.”

According to an article in USA TODAY, during its fiscal year ending Aug. 31, 2020, the NCAA had been scheduled to collect $827 million just from its long-term multimedia and marketing rights agreement with CBS and Turner, according to the association’s recently released audited financial statement. That statement attributed $170 million in non-CBS/Turner revenue for fiscal 2019 to “championships and NIT tournaments,” with a sizable portion of that likely coming from the men’s basketball tournament.

The NCAA has $250 million to $275 million in business-interruption insurance connected to the tournament, but it is unclear how quickly that money would come to the NCAA. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the NCAA is not even sure how much of this money it will get when it does get paid due to the stress the insurance companies will be under as they pay other catastrophic-event claims as well.

Clemson had budgeted $29 million dollars from the ACC, which it normally would receive in June. Those revenues would also include revenue from the ACC Network and other television rights.

“All of the NCAA revenue runs through the conference and is distributed to the member schools,” Radakovich said. “It is a little early to tell at this point in time, but as we look are our revenue drivers, we are going to be refunding the baseball and softball tickets that people had. We will do that individually, but we will also, from that perspective, not have some of the expenses for traveling to various games throughout the rest of this semester.

“We are working out right now as to what some of those business issues might be. We will continue over the coming days be able to finetune that a little bit.”

As far as being able to replace the revenue the athletic department will lose from the ACC, Radakovich admits he does not know if they will be able to replace it.

“I think what you end up doing is not spending maybe an equivalent amount of that money between now and the end of this year,” he said. “So, the fact that we don’t have home events, we are not traveling to road events, people are grounded and not recruiting at this point in time, the spring game has been canceled, a number of other events that we would have had as cost drivers will not be there.

“The trick will be the things we don’t spend money on add up to the money we don’t get as we look to a June 30 fiscal year close.”

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