Can Kentucky play without fans? Mark Stoops is ‘not sure that’s a viable option.’
Mark Stoops doesn’t want to play football without fans in the stands.
The University of Kentucky’s head football coach during a video news conference with reporters Monday said he’s preparing his team as if its season will start as scheduled on Sept. 5. Some domestic professional sports organizations could in the coming months play without fans in attendance, and other leagues around the world have already started doing so.
Doing that at the college level is not so clear-cut, Stoops said.
“The first thing that comes to mind is there’s gonna be a lot of critics out there,” Stoops said. “The optics of it, to say that you’re gonna have college players out there that are allowed to play and line up 6 inches apart from each other, breathe on each other, sweat on each other, get in big piles. You’re gonna do all that but you’re not allowed to have fans in the stadium? ... I’m not sure that’s a viable option.”
College football teams are typically much more reliant on gate revenue than NFL franchises. UK and the Southeastern Conference have lucrative media-rights partnerships, but the university still generated the greatest percentage of its football revenue from ticket sales in fiscal year 2019 ($13,937,802, or 33.7 percent of football revenue).
A season that starts as scheduled — with or without fans — would probably require players to be on campus at least two months before games are played. Stoops and other league coaches met with the SEC office last week to discuss adjustments that possibly could be made with offseason workouts and what coaches might be allowed to do with players whenever they’re allowed to return to campus. Under normal circumstances, following the spring season coaches aren’t allowed to have team-wide, structured practices until late in the summer, about a month before the start of the season, but most schools across the country lost multiple weeks of spring practice as the COVID-19 pandemic set in.
Of course, as Stoops noted, asking players to return to college campuses — which could possibly be closed to in-person instruction this fall — would be a bad look.
“It’s of my opinion that we should play football with fans in attendance,” Stoops said. “I’m gonna do the things that I’ve been told, and that’s to go about my business and do the best we can to prepare our team to be able to play Sept. 5. ... If it does get pushed back, we’ll deal with it the best we can.”
Financials
Stoops last month, when asked about giving salary back to the university, was open to the idea. UK last week announced that it would furlough 1,700 employees. The athletics department operates independently and as of Monday had not announced any pay reductions, layoffs or furloughs.
Kansas on Monday revealed that its athletic director, men’s basketball coach Bill Self and football coach Les Miles would take 10-percent pay cuts for the next six months, saving the university $500,000. It became the latest school to announce reductions in salary for prominent staff members; Louisville last week announced furloughs and a department-wide budget cut of 15 percent, on top of 10-percent pay cuts to head coaches and senior staff members announced earlier in April.
Stoops says he’s brought the subject up “two or three times” to Director of Athletics Mitch Barnhart, and Stoops “imagines that time will come” for UK to institute similar cuts. Asked how the pandemic might affect the financials of college football across the nation moving forward, Stoops said, “I think a lot of things are gonna change moving forward.”
UK in August signed Stoops to a new contract that called for raises of $500,000 each remaining year of the deal, which lasts through June 30, 2025. Stoops’ base salary is $400,000 but with media endorsements and other forms of additional compensation on top of that, he is set to make $5 million over the 2020 season.
