Ohio State’s athletic department began its new fiscal year on July 1 with a "two-month interim budget," according to Joey Kauffman of the COLUMBUS DISPATCH. OSU AD Gene Smith said that it "mirrored a similar interim budget that was put in place for the entire university for the first two months" of FY '21. Kauffman noted it is "rare for OSU’s athletic department to be without a budget for the full fiscal year." Each May, administrators "submit a budget projection for the upcoming fiscal year to the athletic council." But the presentation "was not held this year as the pandemic began leaving some doubt on the football season, which generates a majority of the department’s revenue and remains critical for a budget" that has totaled more than $200M in recent years. Details of the athletic department’s interim budget, which "runs through Aug. 31, are not known." In a letter addressed to the university community in June, then-President Michael Drake wrote that the school "needed to cut" $58M from the university-wide budget during the first two months of FY '21. Kauffman noted that budget "did not set a line item for athletics." Smith "did not disclose the scale of the department’s potential cuts for July and August" (COLUMBUS DISPATCH, 7/14).
