HELENA, Mont.—Universities in the Big Sky Conference have voted to cancel a football media event this summer and play conference volleyball games on a Friday-Saturday schedule to save money.
The league will vote on other cost-saving ideas during the league’s spring meetings May 18-20 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Commissioner Doug Fullerton said possible changes could include moving to a Friday-Saturday schedule for other conference sports, limiting the size of travel parties, deciding whether to hold league championships in some sports, or to reduce the number of teams participating in league tournaments.
“The reason you have tournaments and championships is to keep the intensity during the regular season,” he said, noting that some teams could otherwise be eliminated from contention early in the season, hurting attendance.
Fullerton said the cost savings have to be balanced against the effect of the change.
“If basketball didn’t have a championship, what would that do to a regular-season gate?” he asked.
The members of the Big Sky are Montana, Montana State, Weber State, Eastern Washington, Northern Arizona, Sacramento State, Northern Colorado, Portland State and Idaho State.
Fullerton said canceling the Summer Kickoff in Park City, Utah, will save the league about $30,000, while the schools will save the estimated $3,000 they spent sending their football coach, athletics director and a player to the gathering.
He said the downside is losing some national media attention because writers for The Sports Network and voters in the Football Championship Subdivision poll were brought to the summer meeting to meet coaches and to players.
“The conference is going to have to come up with some new ways to make sure that the Big Sky doesn’t fall of the radar screen,” Fullerton said. “I think we’re going to do a lot more work getting national press out to specific games.”
Another downside is the loss of a face-to-face meeting among the football coaches, league officials and athletics directors to discuss game rules and the league philosophy in calling penalties.
“Now we’re going to have to find a way to conduct that meeting,” Fullerton said.
Switching the conference volleyball schedule to Friday-Saturday, rather than Thursday-Saturday, for all trips except to Northern Arizona would save schools an average of $2,500, Fullerton said, and keep students in class an extra day each week. He said that decision wasn’t held for the spring meeting because he needed to schedule officials.
Dan Davies, Montana State senior associate athletics director for internal operations, said the universities also discussed going to a Friday-Saturday schedule for men’s and women’s basketball and moving to centralized tournament sites.
Davies said some conferences are eliminating league tournaments altogether, but he said the Big Sky wasn’t headed in that direction.
He said a league conference call revealed the schools were split on some of the proposed changes.
“There are varying degrees of pain that schools are showing within the league,” Davies said. “Arizona sounds like their state funding is going to be interesting, as well as, obviously, the state of California,” referring to funding for league members Northern Arizona and Sacramento State.
While Portland State dropped its Pac-10 wrestling program, Fullerton said he did not know of any schools planning to cut Big Sky Conference sports.
