Analysis: ODU Athletics needs those seven-figure guarantees from Virginia Tech

The seven-figure guarantees for ODU to play football games at Virginia Tech in 2026 and 2030 will be huge for the bottom line of ODU Athletics.

The database maintained by Sportico.com tells us that the operating budget for ODU Football for the 2023-2024 academic sports year was $9.7 million, and that the football program ran a $4.3 million operating deficit in that fiscal year.

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ICYMI

• ACC Football: How much will Virginia Tech pay ODU for three guarantee games?

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Sportico also tells us that the Old Dominion athletics department as a whole ran a $4.8 million operating deficit in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, and that was after the injection of $32.4 million in student fees, which provided the bulk of the $53.0 million of the department’s budget for that year.

ODU, incidentally, ranked second nationally in the use of student fees to fund athletics – behind another Virginia school, JMU, which reported $55.5 million in student fees going toward the $76.4 million budget for JMU Athletics in the 2023-2024 fiscal year.

Yikes, indeed.

Virginia Tech will pay ODU $1.1 million for the football game between the two schools in 2026, which is on the schedule for Sept. 12 of that year.

Tech will pay ODU $1.275 million for the 2030 game, which is on the schedule for Sept. 21, 2030.

Wood Selig, the athletics director at ODU, cited the fiscal issues as being paramount in the move to reconfigure the remainder of their originally scheduled 13-game home-and-home football series.

The guarantee game “will allow ODU to support our football program and student-athletes at a much higher level than had we left the contract as it stood. It also allows us to construct a more balanced non-conference football schedule that will benefit our program and our fans,” Selig said in a statement in a press release announcing the move last week.