It still seems like the financial impact of losing the money games would hit next season. Seems like cancelling this season doesn’t save any money unless you take away the scholarships and fire the staff ASAP.
In our case at least, the notion that a UT games pays for our athletic program is a little sketchy. It is probably less than 5% of the budget. As it stands our budget (I’ve read) is something like $25M. Total athletics revenues is about $4M. So without the UT game we’re in the hole $22M instead of $21M. Is that really so apocalyptic? It almost seems like noise. And since there is much talk every year about doing away with “cupcake” games in the Power 5, I would hope FU has already developed a plan for that scenario.
I do worry about other schools, and I wonder if a good many haven’t been in over their heads for a good while. If other SoCon teams are too financially feeble to handle this 100 year event, maybe they belong in DII. But they may as well play this season and bring in some revenue since the scholarship and salary money is already spent.
Maybe to prevent a 2021 die off of FCS programs NCAA could lower the scholarship limits to make the division more affordable in the future.