BY TYLER BISCHOFF
tfbischo@go.olemiss.edu
After the Ole Miss baseball team defeated Binghamton Saturday in regional play, Ole Miss athletics director Ross Bjork fired out a tweet of pride.
“No one else can define our ceiling for us: let’s build on the momentum of bowl game win & NCAA men’s basketball & baseball tourney victories.”
But Ole Miss does have a ceiling, a $51 million ceiling.
In 2012, Ole Miss athletics brought in $51,858,993 in revenue, according to USA Today. That ranks second to last in the Southeastern Conference. Only Missouri had less revenue than Ole Miss, as Missouri brought in over $50 million. Vanderbilt is not included in this list because they are a private institution and do not have to report their revenues or expenses.
Not only is Ole Miss near the bottom of the SEC pile, but the schools ahead of Ole Miss are bringing in much more money.
Alabama led the conference by bringing in over $124 million, while six other SEC schools had revenues of over $100 million. The 13 SEC schools that reported averaged over $94 million in revenue.
So, Ole Miss is bringing in over $70 million less than Alabama and over $40 million less than the average of the SEC.
That’s the problem for Ole Miss. The competition is playing with $90 or $100 million, while Ole Miss has to turn $51 million into results.
In the short run, Ole Miss can make some noise. They can outplay their budget. They can put together a great football team or a great year for all athletics or even put together a few years in a row of greatness, but a deficit of $40 million or more is too much to expect to compete over a long time frame. The ceiling at Alabama is way higher than Ole Miss. Even in-state rival Mississippi State has a higher ceiling by bringing in just under $70 million while Ole Miss is stuck under a $51 million dollar ceiling.
The revenue dictates the spending, and spending is necessary to compete and win in college athletics.
Most SEC schools spend less than they bring in. Only Missouri had higher expenses than revenues, losing over $16 million, but five SEC schools’ revenues were at least $10 million more than their expenses. Texas A&M profited nearly $38 million from athletics.
Those schools are spending more than Ole Miss and still have room to spend more. Ole Miss spent 99.7 percent of their athletic revenues, leaving no room to budge, unlike their opponents.
The easy answer is for Ole Miss to increase their revenues and that is a major goal of the athletic department. The newly branded Ole Miss Athletics Foundation is aimed at increasing the donations to the athletics department.
But obtaining all that money is the difficult part. Winning, especially on the football field, will increase excitement and increase donation, but jumping from $51 million to $100 million is an extremely tall task that seems unobtainable in the short term.
If Ole Miss is to become a major athletic power in multiple sports and stay there for a long period of time, then maybe Ross Bjork really is a miracle worker. But without a substantial increase in the revenue for the department, there is only so much the athletics program can achieve before hitting the ceiling.
