“That’s men and women. If you look at the numbers for us at the University of Alabama, with our 19 sports outside of football and men’s basketball, we lost collectively almost $40 million. We funded that through our revenue from a football and men’s basketball standpoint.
“So potentially, which one specifically, if I’m just saying this in general: if I’m a swimming student-athlete. If I’m a tennis, I’m a track, any of those sports– those are really important to our universities– we want to compete in them. I can’t stress that enough. But there also will have to be decisions made because there’s not an unlimited supply of money like some believe."
Still, later in 2024, speaking to reporters at that year’s SEC spring meetings, Byrne made clear that while the Olympic sports were costly, Alabama wanted to keep all of them, if possible.
“Obviously, you don’t want to do (cut sports) ,” Byrne said. “You’ve seen Loyola Marymount, you’ve seen a couple of other schools since COVID who had reduced sports, but obviously that would be the last thing we want to do.”
