Arkansas cutting tennis is an ominous preview for non-football sports

Now, here's the math that every athletic director at every Power Four school is quietly running as they hear the news out of Fayetteville: Can we generate $30 million in new football revenue every year? At some point, the money has to come from somewhere else, and "somewhere else" means the cross-country team. Or the gymnastics program. The swim team. The tennis program. The sports that produce no revenue but cost real money to operate.

The Reaping Is Coming

The scariest part of it all: Arkansas is not an anomaly; Arkansas is a preview.

Cutting the Razorbacks tennis teams is only a glimpse into what is coming. Right now, every athletic director in the SEC, Big Ten, and Big 12 is sitting in a room with a spreadsheet in front of them. There's one column labeled "football costs" that is exponentially growing, and a column labeled "budget" that is not keeping pace. The question isn't whether other schools will cut sports. The question is which sports and when.

Just think about which sports are the most vulnerable to this new era of college athletics, and you'll find that they all share something in common. They produce virtually no ticket revenue, they generate little viewership interest, but they occupy expensive facilities, and they all require full scholarship commitments for rosters of 10 to 30 athletes. In the old model of college athletics, these programs were easily justified as part of the "full collegiate experience," the idea that a major university offers a wide range of athletic opportunities because hey, that's what universities do. That idea is now being quietly phased out, one program at a time.

What We're Really Losing

For every $4 million quarterback that signs with a Power Four school, will there be a tennis player, a swimmer, a gymnast, someone who did everything right, losing their sport entirely?

This is where the story stops being about money and starts being about something much harder to quantify. The sports that are being sacrificed on the altar of college football aren't just line items on a budget. They are the primary pipeline feeding the United States Olympic program.

Tennis, swimming, gymnastics, track and field and even rowing. These are all sports that the United States dominates, or has dominated, at the Olympic Games for generations. And the infrastructure that produced that dominance was built on college athletic fields, pools, and courts. These universities that provide the facilities, coaching staffs, scholarships, and competitive structure for these sports have no professional league waiting at the end, like the NFL and NBA. College is the career.

With Arkansas cutting its tennis programs, it doesn't just affect the players scrambling to try to find a new school or weighing the option to stay and not play the sport they love. It sends a signal down the entire developmental chain from high school coaches to junior programs, to families deciding where to invest their money and their kids' futures. Why pursue tennis at the highest level if the collegiate infrastructure is being dismantled beneath your feet?

Are we making a long-term bet that college football's 'short-term' financial demands are worth America's long-term Olympic identity?

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

At what point does a major university's athletic department just mean football? We are not there yet, but we are building the road straight to it. And if the current trajectory holds, with NIL costs continuing to rise, revenue sharing between schools and athletes becoming the standard, and non-revenue sports continuing to be exposed as financial burdens, the Power Four schools of 2035 may sponsor only eight sports...maybe six...maybe four. Football, basketball, baseball, softball, and whatever else they're legally required to keep around.

This situation brings The Hunger Games to mind. because in Suzanne Collins's world, the Capitol demanded tribute from all of the districts to sustain its power and spectacle. In college athletics, football is the Capitol. And every year, the reaping is going to come for another program and another group of young student athletes who trained their entire lives, earned their scholarships, and believed their sport was safe.

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This article originally appeared on College Sports Wire: Arkansas cutting tennis is a preview of football's takeover