Brown could lose four athletic programs

According to Bloomberg, a committee at Brown has recommended the school eliminate four of its 38 athletic programs: men's and women's fencing, wrestling and women's skiing. The money freed up from the cuts would be redistributed to the school's other programs, increasing their budget by 10 percent.

Two interesting takeaways from the report: First, Brown is the Ivy League university that brought in the least athletics revenue in 2009-10 at $15.2 million. Penn, with $30.4 million, ranked second to Yale (this information is publicly available online through the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act). More notable, however, is the appeal to the University's academic program that was used to justify the cuts.

According to the committee's final report — which can be viewed online — Brown prez Ruth Simmons formed the school's Athletic Review Committee following a trustee's meeting in February. One of the group's main directives was "the charge to align the program as closely as possible with the University’s overall academic and educational program, including the limitations on resource commitments that are suggested by that principle."

What that goal, in conjunction with the overall decision made by the committee, seems to indicate is that the committee felt that Brown no longer had the resources to sustain its 38 programs. Rather than continuing to harbor the third-largest program in the Ivy League, the committee suggests that cutting these four teams would strengthen " the student-athlete experience and the excellence of the overall program" as well as ensure that Brown's athletics program would be aligned "more closely with the academic and educational goals and priorities of the University."

Does that appeal to academics have ramifications for Penn? Perhaps, but recall that Penn's athletics revenue is double Brown's while the Quakers harbor fewer varsity sports (31 to Brown's 38). Instead, these words seems more threatening to the programs at Harvard and Dartmouth — the schools who pull in the next smallest amounts and, coincidentally, the only two Ivies that field varsity ski teams.

Most interesting, at least for me, are the rationales used to choose these four teams . Brown's committee suggested that fencing "would require a large investment in facilities, infrastructure, and coaching" in order to bring the program up to competitive speed. While skiing was chosen because of the Bears' lack of facilities. It's worth nothing that while the committee states there are only a small number of fencing programs nationally — 34 men's programs (20 in Division I) and 41 women's programs (23 in D-I — -the same can't be said for the Ivy league. Dartmouth is the only Ivy school without a varsity fencing team, while Cornell only sponsors a women's program. Compare briefly to the Ancient Eight's three total skiing teams.

The big shock reading the report was the recommendation that wrestling be slashed. Wrestling is hardly football or basketball, granted, but it's still a major collegiate sport. But the committee says the program is simply too expensive, requires way too many admissions slots, and makes the school's commitment to gender equity difficult.

Six Ivy schools currently sport wrestling programs (Dartmouth and Yale--coincidentally the league's biggest revenue-earner--don't), and the only two with an overall winning record this year were Cornell and Penn. I wonder to what extent the decision to nix this program came from the major deficit that Brown faces in trying to keep its wrestling program up to the top level in the League. Given Cornell's commitment to its wrestling team, as documented by the New York Times, the Bears would face a huge uphill battle in both recruiting and facilities if they wanted to be competitive within the League.

I should re-iterate that I don't find this report to be any immediate insight into what Penn's athletics department might do, especially given the school's reported 2009-10 revenues relative to its peers. In 2009, Penn reported a surplus of about $1.8-million from its team-related revenues and expenses, while Brown broke even on the associated line items.

But the report provides an interesting insight into how one Ivy League school is mitigating its current finances and provides possible clues to how the others might follow. And that trend could have ramifications on the Ancient Eight's competitive landscape.