<p><strong>W</strong><em>e’ve all endured more than four months with hardly any live sports to speak of, and the fall season has long been serving as the light at the end of the tunnel for fans all across the country.</em></p><p><em>But what if that light goes out?</em></p><p><em>The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon — cases are spiking in several states, and summer workouts have been either restricted or put on hold in many places. Morehouse College cancelled all of its fall sports seasons, and the Ivy League has postponed all athletic activity until at least January. The Big Ten has scratched all of its nonconference football games; other leagues are sure to follow.</em></p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]<p><em>So with that in mind, it’s fair to ask about the doomsday scenario: What happens if there is no high school football in Johnson County this fall?</em></p><p><em>In the first of a three-part series, we examine what a lost 2020 season wo</em><em>uld mean from a financial standpoint to the high school athletic departments who rely on football as a primary revenue source for the year.</em></p><p>The old adage that football pays for every other school sport isn’t necessarily true across the board; at a smaller high school like Edinburgh, it’s considered a win if the football team makes enough money to support itself, never mind everybody else.</p><p>But the money passing through the ticket windows on Friday nights in the fall is the largest source of revenue for almost every high school athletic department in the state. At Center Grove, for example, the gate receipts from home football games (including reserved seats) accounted for nearly a third of all athletic income during the 2018-19 school year; the proportion would have likely been higher had boys basketball not drawn larger-than-normal crowds that winter due to the presence of All-American Trayce Jackson-Davis.</p><p>What if that water ran dry this fall?</p><p>Different schools would be affected differently were the 2020 football season to be cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns — but it would certainly leave a mark of some sort at every high school in Johnson County.</p><p>“Financially, it would be devastating,” Greenwood athletic director Rob Irwin said.</p><p>Even accounting for the fact that there wouldn’t be any game-day expenses — costs for game officials and the like range from about $500 per home game at Edinburgh to $2,000 at Center Grove — schools would still take a big hit on football if games weren’t played this fall. One of the largest annual expenses for athletic departments is the purchase and maintenance of football equipment — buying new helmets and pads, or reconditioning the existing ones each year. For teams with larger rosters such as Center Grove and Whiteland, that can cost $20,000 each year. Even at Edinburgh, which only suits up about 20 or 30 players every season, it’s a $4,000 expense.</p><p>That’s hard enough for some schools to make up with a full schedule. Paying those expenses this year and not having the chance to recoup them through ticket revenue would be a crushing blow.</p><p>“Think about this — if we don’t have football this year and we do next year, well, all those helmets and shoulder pads, they still have to be reconditioned, because it’s a year-by-year thing,” Franklin athletic director Bill Doty said. “Next year’s expenses will still come, and without that revenue, it will be a huge blow to the football program.”</p><p>“We would probably have to hold off on ordering uniforms and that kind of stuff,” Edinburgh AD David Walden added.</p><p>With dominoes already falling around the country — many colleges are either shortening or eliminating their fall seasons, and states have started to debate doing the same with theirs — Center Grove athletic director Jon Zwitt has been pondering three different scenarios that could play out in the event that there isn’t a full season.</p><p>One, obviously, would be that the entire season is wiped out. A second would be the season starting and then getting cut short before it reaches its conclusion, much like boys basketball was in March. The third would be a postponement of the start of the season, resulting in a shortened regular season but possibly a completed state tournament (perhaps the only of those three scenarios that would ensure the financial survival of the IHSAA this fall).</p><p>All are still on the table at this point, as is a full, uninterrupted campaign. But for how long? And if some or all of the games do get played, will there be any restrictions on crowd size? The NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball are all attempting to begin or resume their seasons this summer without fans in attendance. Those professional leagues — and the major college football conferences — all have television deals that still bring in a great deal of revenue.</p><p>Local high schools, obviously, don’t have that.</p><p>“It would kill us if we can’t have people in the stands,” Irwin said. “We would be better off — not for kids, but financially, you’re better off not having it than having it without fans.”</p><p>“Football’s an expensive sport to play,” Whiteland AD Dave Edens added. “Everybody knows that. And football more than recoups those expenses by the gates they have Friday night, and of course that helps drive the whole athletic department financially. If you start limiting how many people we can let in, but we still play football, that’s where it will hurt a little bit.”</p><p>One option that’s being discussed by some leagues across the state, including the MIC and the Mid-State Conference, is offering live pay-per-view broadcasts on Friday nights. That would give fans who either are prevented from attending, or don’t feel safe attending even if they’re allowed to, a way to watch the games — and also give schools a chance to generate at least some revenue.</p><p>Schools are exploring any available ways to mitigate the potential lost income, because too much is at stake not to.</p><p>“Especially with Warren Central and Carmel being the two opening home games,” Zwitt said. “Right now, it’s no spectators until Aug. 15. If they were to all of a sudden say we’re going to back that up to Sept. 15, and we can play Warren Central and Carmel but with no spectators, it’s like, ‘Wow.’ That’s a huge loss for us. Huge.”</p><p>The bigger loss, of course, from the standpoint of the players and the communities, would be not having football at all. If it’s at all possible to play the season, schools will move forward doing so for the benefit of the kids — no matter how bone-jarring the financial fallout might be.</p><p>“The expense of football’s going to be there no matter what,” Edens said. “You hope that you can recoup some of that cost, but if I can’t recoup that cost but these kids can still play football, then we’ll figure it out.”</p>
