Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I’m not used to writing a lot about the Campbell University Camels on this newsletter. I know they have an excellent baseball program, they’re in Buies Creek, North Carolina, they’re a small, private college in the CAA, and their fans apparently say Roll Humps, which is maybe my new favorite fan slogan.

I also knew that Campbell had a real wrestling tradition. Remember when we wrote about how the University of Wyoming scheduled a wrestling match in a barn? They put it on UFC Fight Pass and everything. That was against Campbell. Also, the Camels won.

But earlier this week, I stared to hear some different stories about Campbell wrestling. Namely, that the school was slashing the budget.

Strangely, I don’t believe the school has outright confirmed anything specific (nor did they respond to my request for comment), but the story has begun to leak out on social media.

Other Extra Points readers who are close to the collegiate wrestling community have told me they’ve heard similar stories out of Campbell…i.e, that the school plans to dramatically slash the number of scholarships they offer, but I have yet to see any official confirmation, or rationale, from the school.

A university spokesperson provided the following statement to ABC 11:

Let’s assume Mr. Christian here is correct, at least about the university cutting their financial commitment towards wrestling.

Why would they do this? And did they make a mistake?

As a private school, I’m unable to file open records requests and snoop through the athletic department’s financial records. But I do think we can safely assume that Campbell is not secretly swimming in massive piles of money. Private schools with endowments under $300 million and with enrollment under 7,000 students are generally not the sort of schools that are dropping 150 million a year on athletics.

We can do some very rough back-of-the-napkin benchmarking, thanks to data obtained via the Extra Points Library. If fellow CAA institutions Towson ($29.8 million), Stony Brook ($39.7 million) and UNC Wilmington ($18 million) are reporting annual operating expenses at under $40 million, and a few Big South schools (Campbell’s former conference) are in the $9-15 million range, I’d make an educated guess that Campbell’s athletic budget is probably somewhere in the $15-$30 million range. Not big money.

So I can understand why any school in that range would be very budget conscious

I don’t think I have enough information right now to make any sort of value judgement about these cuts. If the university as a whole is facing financial struggles, and they think that reducing scholarship commitments (and potentially other cuts) can generate more tuition revenue, that could be an unfortunate, but potentially defensible, decision. Lots of schools are facing significant financial pressures that have little to do with sports, and reducing scholarships/tuition discounting is one of the ways many institutions will try to find more money.

If the school is trying to save money on Olympic sports programs to potentially reinvest money elsewhere in the athletic department, (like hypothetically, in football or basketball), I’d argue that is probably a bad idea, especially since I think Camel football and basketball are probably further away from national competitiveness than whatever savings could be squeezed from six wrestling scholarships.

I talked about this story a bit with in-market radio guys Joe Ovies and Joe Giglio, who suggested that some of this might have been avoidable if Campbell hadn’t made mistakes with previous athletic directors or senior university administrators. That’s entirely possible, but I don’t feel like I know enough right now to make any sort of confident pronouncement. I look forward to learning more about the specifics of this particular situation over the coming days.

The most interesting question to me, I think, is is this a trend? 

I do expect more big-budget, P4 programs to announce cuts to various scholarship offerings in Olympic sports, particularly in sports like track, men’s volleyball, men’s gymnastics, swimming, and yes, wrestling. I think they’ll do this not because they can’t afford them, necessarily, but because they want to clear salary cap room as they expand scholarship offerings elsewhere in the department and prepare for athlete revenue sharing. If you have football and basketball programs that are actually revenue positive, and suddenly need to pay $22 million more in athlete distributions…maybe those swim programs look a little more D-IIIish. Ohio State is reportedly already doing this.

But the math and political calculations behind Ohio State dropping some gymnastics scholarships don’t look to be the same ones that Campbell (or a High Point or Longwood or Maine) would face, unless Campbell is planning on opting into House and dramatically increasing spending elsewhere.

So are the cuts about institutional-specific economic headwinds? The price to pay for previous mistakes? The start of an, uh, very aggressive gambit? I don’t know. I hope more becomes clear soon….because the answer may tell us more about what to expect elsewhere.

Here’s what else we wrote this week:

Hey, did you know I spend last week in Provo? It’s true!

First, I talked to a bunch of BYU fans who aren’t members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (aka the Mormons)….including dozens of folks who used to be Mormon. Why are they sticking around? What compels somebody to pregame a BYU football game with actual jello shots? Well, friend, you’ll just have to click the link to find out.

I followed that up with a more personal reflection on personal identity, religion, and college sports. I grew up LDS (like, really LDS. Do you guys have any idea how much time I spent in Kirtland, Ohio? A LOT), so reporting out this story was a more emotional than my typical EP newsletter.

If you don’t care about all this messy talk about God, that’s cool! I also wrote about the enrollment cliff. It’s getting better for many state flagships and elite private schools. But bad news! That still leaves most of D-II and D-III.

And finally, I’ve done even MORE updates to Extra Points Library. What’s that, you ask?

Great question! That’s our huge new subscription data product that allows users to browse over 4,000 athletic department budgets, coach contracts, vendor contracts, athletic director contracts, and much more…with more added nearly every day. Want to see a search firm deal? Wonder what Pepsi pouring rights look like? What college tennis coaches make and how their buyouts are set up? How much Southern Utah makes in ticket sales? I got you. Check out the Library today.

Next week, I’ve got some FOIA stories to share with everybody about private equity and college athletics…along with TV deal reporting, and updates on the Extra Points Bowl. We’ve got more road trips coming up in the near future too!

Thanks for reading, everybody. Have a great weekend. I’ll see you on the internet.