Peterson: Jamie Pollard is right — Iowa State athletics should circle its financial wagons

Jamie Pollard thankfully made something perfectly clear while teleconferencing with reporters for more than an hour Thursday.

The Iowa State athletics department will not seek financial relief from the university, state government or anywhere else that involves public money. The department will clean up its own fallout from the cancellation of lucrative basketball tournaments and free-wheeling expenditures during much better financial times.

Unless there’s a complete shutdown of the 2020 football season, that is, because if that happens, well, all bets are off. 

“That’s a complete game-changer,” the athletics director said.

Pollard spoke a day after announcing ways to help combat a financial shortfall that will result not only at Iowa State, but just about everywhere after the coronavirus pandemic forced cancellation of conference basketball tournaments and March Madness.

Iowa State coaches and administrative staff, including Pollard, will be hit the hardest, each having salaries reduced by 10 percent on a one-year basis. It certainly beats the possibility of cutting sports and laying off lesser-paid staffers. Something similar will happen at other places, as universities both large and small grapple with imminent financial predicaments.

“I know from talking to many of my peers, that they want to do what we just did,” said Pollard, whose $757,000 salary also will include a 10 percent reduction. “We weren’t first because we wanted to be first. We were first because we have a system that allowed us to be first.

“I know there will be others that will follow suit, because there’s others that think exactly the way I know I think about this.

“I (also) recognize there will be others that won’t think about it that way, and maybe have huge reserves and can deal with things in a different way, but I will say there’s a lot of (schools) that are really worried about what the financial future holds, both the known and the unknown.”

Reducing hefty coaching salaries is something that’s been overdue for a long time. It’s past the Golden Age of college athletics, where high-end coaches received nearly everything they wanted. Is a temporary reduction in pay a the first step toward making coaching contracts less lucrative than they are now?

Stay tuned on that one, but this much is clear: We're past the free-spending days when universities throughout the country spent revenues on lavish building projects, coaching salaries and big-buck buyouts.

"We have a $27 million payroll, and out of 200 employees, 50 of them are making 50 percent of that payroll," Pollard said. "So, approaching this by saying we won't fill open positions or we'll layoff people who are unessential — that isn't going to work for the athletics department, because the only way to do that is to drop four or five sports or eliminate every administrative person in the department, including units that support our coaches.

"If we did that, they'd go on unemployment and that would add to the state's problems, so all I'd be doing is passing the burden on to taxpayers.

"We felt like we needed another solution."

He got coaches to agree to a pay cut, instead of dipping into whatever reserves may be in the till.

"Some of our coaches have said "Let me do more," Pollard said.

You can forgive athletics departments for not preparing their reserves for a pandemic. But so few were even prepared for less jarring speed bumps. 

Some weren’t thinking ahead to what their world could look like without football — and really, why would they? When is the last time a college football season has been canceled?

I'm not saying that will happen in this instance, but schools will have to find money somewhere if that’s the outcome.

What happened with Iowa State’s total operating revenue of $95.4 million that the school reported in the 2019 fiscal year? What happened to Iowa’s $151.9 million? Being prepared for a major, majodownturn of some sort wasn't part of the plan.

“When I started 15 years ago ... I said we’re not going to spend every dollar we have,” Pollard said. “We’re going to build some reserves, so that when we have some tough decisions to make — like several years ago, when we had to make a football coaching change and had to have a big payout — that we had an ability to do that.

“We have built up reserves, but at the same token, we have embarked upon some really aggressive facility plans within the last year.”

Funding for Iowa State’s $90 million student performance center that's under construction includes $20 million of the athletic department’s reserves, Pollard said.

He couldn’t put a number on how much remains in the reserve fund. He said, however, “that our reserve is not as big as it was before we started our facility projects a year ago, and so I’d rather not speak to the exact number.”

And to the question on so many minds: What happens if even a modified college football season causes deeper financial cuts?

"There's going to be future financial challenges that we all have to deal with," Pollard said.

He mentioned a recent conversation he had with Iowa State faculty-athletics representative Tim Day. It makes sense.

“He said what we’re facing right now is one of three things,” Pollard recalled. “It’s either a winter blizzard that we hunker down for the weekend. It’s the Farmer’s Almanac predicting that we’re going to have a really hard winter, or we’re facing the Ice Age.

“I think we’ve all figured out that this is bigger than a blizzard (where) we’re shut down for the weekend. We’re probably in a phase right now that we’re in a long, hard winter.

“But if we can’t play football this fall, I mean, it’s Ice Age time. There is nobody in our industry right now that could reasonably forecast a contingency plan for how they would get through not playing any football games.”

Iowa State columnist Randy Peterson has been writing for the Des Moines Register for parts of six decades. Reach him at rpeterson@dmreg.com, 515-284-8132, and on Twitter at @RandyPete. No one covers the Cyclones like the Register. Subscribe today at DesMoinesRegister.com/Deal to make sure you never miss a moment.