University of Florida CompSci

[ghost]

Folks really need to read up on this issue. There are a lot of misconceptions out there, most of them already covered here.

1. The vast majority of college sports operations do not bring in revenue directly to the general budget of their sponsoring university. Most of them are a net loss, sometimes quite dramatically so once you factor in construction of facilities. This includes football and basketball EVEN at some Division I institutions.

2. Those football and basketball programs that do not lose money outright often do not contribute funds directly to the general budgets, but instead subsidize other athletic activities. Which, I guess, keeps their host institutions from having to spend much on those other teams, but this is not what people imply when they talk about these programs making money--they imply that these programs are supporting academic departments. This is simply not the case except at a tiny handful of institutions.

3. Even at (especially at!) those institutions where Division I football and basketball actually contribute money to the general budget, they often put other burdens on the university as a whole. Most crucially, the frequent corruption of academic programs of study that are tailored to keeping athletes within NCAA eligibility guidelines. There are faculty positions and even a few programs/departments that exist primarily to keep athletes from being exposed to academic danger, which is an indirect cost in real financial terms and a bigger cost in terms of undercutting the entire point of higher education.

4. Alumni giving is in some cases clearly driven by loyalty to athletic teams. Guess what alumni giving driven by athletics often leads to? Restricted donations to athletics. *Especially* the big-name donors. T. Boone Pickens, for example, has given close to $300 million to OSU--entirely for a stadium and an "athletic village".  Elite institutions with very little emphasis on athletics in relative terms do just fine in getting donations--and non-selective institutions that have a lot of investment in athletics don't find that the sports teams particularly help them build their endowments.


Look, sports *is* an important part of the emotional ties between universities, alumni and communities. But there's nothing that says that they have to operate under the penumbra of a non-profit budgetary structure. I think NCAA Division I football and basketball should be spun off as for-profit minor leagues with a majority ownership stake given to their founding universities. The athletes should be paid and given "right of admission" at any time if they decide to quit and attend the university that owns their team. Drop all the bullshit about the athletes being students. And make the budgets clean--if they produce revenue for their owners, great. If they don't, they don't and that'll be clear and if they can't be made profitable, then we won't have all these lies and misconceptions about how big college sports are the only thing keeping higher education going.

This is the only view on this situation that makes any sense at all.  This is a very nicely put together read, Khaldun. 

[Murgos]

No it doesn't.  His two key points are that large college sports operations save money for the U by funding other athletic programs and that sometimes Alumni give money to Athletic programs that also saves money for the U.

It's a pretty shit argument if it's supposed to be arguing against large athletic programs in general, really.

[Khaldun]

Mens corpore in mens sana (healthy minds, healthy bodies) only goes so far as a justification of athletics in higher education. Some kind of physical, competitive activity does a lot to help residential undergraduates live an enriched life and form complete communities. Team sports teach a whole bunch of social skills that have interesting collateral payoffs in academic study. But these functions put athletics alongside and equal to a bunch of other extracurricular activities, and all told all those activities are an important part of higher education inasmuch as they modify, enrich or contribute to the core purpose of higher education: getting educated. When athletics becomes a major drain on the budget, as it is at many universities, it's time to rethink and scale back. You can get all of the value of a highly competitive football team for the students through walk-on rugby, ultimate frisbee, you name it, various far cheaper options. The community around a university doesn't get the same entertainment value from those sports, and they don't have the same deep traditions of spurring students to root for their institution. But that's why the expensive sports need to stand on their own financially--to be sustainable minor leagues that pay players what they're worth. It's idiotic to have universities, public or otherwise, subordinate their entire mission to sustaining what are effectively minor league sports franchises--and that's pretty much where we're at with Division I institutions, particularly those that have money-losing operations. Rutgers is a great example: they've dumped endless amounts of cash taken from NJ taxpayers into building football up, have yet to see meaningful revenue come back from that investment, and have in the meantime been making deep cuts to the academic budgets over the same time period. That's flat-out stupid before we even get into the unspeakable corruption that's involved in getting NCAA athletes all sorts of perks, payments and support under the table and the gross manipulations of academic programs in order to prove that full-time athletes are actually "students". 

Nobody's getting what they want or need out of this whole system other than the NCAA, the TV networks, and jock-sniffing university presidents and rich alumni boosters. The institutions themselves are taking a big financial hit, they're compromising most of their standards and rules, and the players aren't getting paid what they're worth in terms of the revenue that their labor produces for a few people at the top (most of them not even associated with universities). The fans get their games, but they could get those games just as well if these teams had the same names, the same traditions of association with their host universities, but were minor leagues owned 50-50 by the universities and the NFL/NBA.

[ghost]

No it doesn't.  His two key points are that large college sports operations save money for the U by funding other athletic programs and that sometimes Alumni give money to Athletic programs that also saves money for the U.

It's a pretty shit argument if it's supposed to be arguing against large athletic programs in general, really.

That really wasn't what he said at all. 

[Murgos]

No it doesn't.  His two key points are that large college sports operations save money for the U by funding other athletic programs and that sometimes Alumni give money to Athletic programs that also saves money for the U.

It's a pretty shit argument if it's supposed to be arguing against large athletic programs in general, really.

That really wasn't what he said at all. 

Yes it is.  Point 3 is anecdotal, at best, and Point 1 is just flat out false as far as I can tell.

Out of the SEC,  Big Ten, ACC,  Pac-10, Big 12 and Big East there are TWO teams (out of 64) that did not make at least a 7 figure profit on their football program in 2009.

http://businessofcollegesports.com/2011/01/26/whos-making-money-in-sec-football/
http://businessofcollegesports.com/2011/01/30/how-big-is-the-big-ten-financially/
http://businessofcollegesports.com/2011/02/24/acc-football-no-cash-cow/
http://businessofcollegesports.com/2011/03/04/pac-10-financials-show-little-athetics-profit/
http://businessofcollegesports.com/2011/03/20/whos-making-money-in-big-12-football/
http://businessofcollegesports.com/2011/03/23/money-not-as-big-in-big-east-football/

If not one of your points is valid than how can I take any of it seriously?  Like I said it's a shit argument against big college sports.

If you really want to argue against the 'student-athlete' system then I want some evidence that shows that college athletes who did not go on to professional athletic careers underperformed other students in their degree field (or even graduating class).  Because, at least at division I schools no one has shown me real evidence that the Football program is a burden on the University hosting it so lets just stop with that.

[Khaldun]

1. Take a much harder look at what happens to "profit" than what Title IV provides. You'll quickly see that this data is more manipulated than Hollywood "profit" and that very little of it is reinvested in the *academic* side of university operations or in the general budget. It's paper profit, not net revenues to the core budgets of the sponsoring universities.
2. Read Bowen et al Reclaiming the Game if you want a fucking shitload of hard data on what happens to college athletes in terms of their education, or how the whole system is manipulated both in terms of reported "profit" and educational outcomes. Then move on to the 25+ journalistic and hard-data studies of college athletics for dessert that pretty much document the same corruption in different terms.

Or just tell yourself it's all profit and you can watch your games knowing you're helping some little comp sci major at Mighty Big U study with a good professor. As long as you're at it, ask for a pony and tell yourself there's no global warming.

[Khaldun]

Some fun links if you want to see what happens to the integrity of universities caught up in Division I. I am absolutely certain that this kind of stuff is happening at virtually all Division I schools--there was a very similar scandal at Michigan a while back.


http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/05/04/3218961/report-finds-academic-fraud-evidence.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/sports/13cnd-auburn.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/sports/ncaabasketball/after-a-costly-scandal-binghamton-begins-rebuilding.html?pagewanted=all

This isn't just about the athletes: when faculty are pressured to create bogus classes like "Theories of Softball I" or the Auburn professor's directed reading, it has an impact on the work that all students are doing, it distorts the entire institution. And I also guarantee you that there's money at the root of this, not just trying to maintain a winning team for the sake of institutional spirit or some such. Take the tenured faculty member at UNC: why was he involved in helping to create fake classes (because as I read it, I'm pretty sure he was involved in forging names on bogus course documents)? The only reason I could imagine somebody doing that is that they're getting paid under the table somehow.

[ghost]

The only reason I could imagine somebody doing that is that they're getting paid under the table somehow.

Or extorted.  "Hey, I know you love your job, right?"   

[Khaldun]

Getting rid of a tenured prof is pretty tough even at a corrupt place--most tenured professors would just shrug and say, "try it". Unless they had something really bad to hide. But adjunct or untenured faculty are very vulnerable, and they are now 60-70% of the teaching faculty at most public universities, so lots of people to lean on. That's what kicked off the Binghamton scandal, actually--the administration fired an adjunct professor who had the guts to flunk an athlete and she went to the press. Once reporters started looking into it, the whole place was so dirty that that was the least of it.

Here's a fun chart from Bloomberg about which sports operations produce net profits for their public university hosts. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-03/rutgers-football-fails-profit-test-as-students-pay-1-000.html

Hint: it's not very many. Rutgers is by far the worst-case scenario though: it's costing each student in the system (this includes all of the campuses, not just New Brunswick) $1,000 per year plus it's led to direct cuts in lots of academic programs.

[ghost]

And grad students/TAs would fit in that scenario pretty nicely.

[Strazos]

I will never understand why college sports are such a big deal - universities exist to educate. If you want to play a sport while you're there, you can pay like the rest of adults do outside of a university setting.

[Murgos]

1. Take a much harder look at what happens to "profit" than what Title IV provides. You'll quickly see that this data is more manipulated than Hollywood "profit" and that very little of it is reinvested in the *academic* side of university operations or in the general budget. It's paper profit, not net revenues to the core budgets of the sponsoring universities.

Would you get off this?  Just because the money doesn't go directly in the general budget or into paying directly for the academic costs of the university doesn't mean it's not profit or that it doesn't benefit the school as a whole.

Schools need students and students are, at least partially, attracted by the quality of the athletics.  Additionally, at many schools the big teams, Football and Basketball pay for themselves and many other products offered by the athletic dept and campus facilities.

Your argument seems to be, "It doesn't go into my pocket with a number marked by origin source that says 'football' so therefor it doesn't exist."  It's nonsense.


Edit:  Also, you're still arguing anecdote for corruption.  I'm sure that if it were interesting for reporters to write stories about how some Professor or Dept didn't get pressured by an athletic department to do something questionable I could dig up two or three examples of that reported in a newspaper somewhere as well.

Let me put it this way.  IF X is the number of college athletic departments (thousands) and A is the number of college athletic departments implicated in an academic scandal (a few a year) then X - A is approximately equal to X.  It's just not convincing despite what you 'feel' or are 'sure of'.

[ghost]

Would you get off this?  Just because the money doesn't go directly in the general budget or into paying directly for the academic costs of the university doesn't mean it's not profit or that it doesn't benefit the school as a whole.

The point that you are continuing to miss is that most athletic programs don't make money.  

Here's a chart showing that there are only 22 schools that made a profit in 2010 (which was apparently up from 14 the year before).  It includes donations, and shockingly Okie State and Oregon are on the list.  

"Athletics apparently has no oversight," says Ken Struckmeyer, an associate professor at Washington State who co-chairs the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a faculty group that advocates for athletics reform. "They generate (money), then they spend whatever they bring in — and if that's not enough, the board of regents provides a subsidy to help them win. … Apparently the measure of success of universities now is wins by the football team or the basketball team."

[Khaldun]

First, the point is that athletic supporters frequently justify the high costs of Division I athletics by arguing that Division I athletics support the academic operations of a university directly. So it's important to hammer home the point that this is not the case in most Division I institutions. Quite the opposite: most Division I athletics takes money from the general budget and/or requires direct fees charged to students and is not self-sustaining.

Second, anything that requires support from a general budget has to be put up alongside other costs. Trade-offs apply to everything. You might attract some population of students by building an amusement park on campus too, but the cost to benefit ratio wouldn't justify doing so--and the amusement park would be at best disconnected from the core purpose of an institution of higher education, more likely actively distracting from that purpose.

So ask this:

Would more than a tiny handful of students attend a university that had all athletics and no academics? No. There is no such place. The first and last point of a university is to educate: the academics are non-optional.

Would they attend a university that had all academics and no athletics (at least no intercollegiate athletics)? Yes. There are such places, and many more where intercollegiate athletics is unmistakeably a side activity whose costs are kept in check. Athletics are supplementary.

Intercollegiate athletics that drain considerable money *from* academic operations or that impose high direct costs on students put the supplementary above the essential. And they impose high indirect costs by subverting or corrupting the core mission and principles of universities.

--------------

From the perspective of a fan of college athletics, can I ask, "What would change if the Michigan Wolverine football team was a minor league NFL franchise that played in a stadium on the University of Michigan campus and was 51% owned by the University of Michigan"?

[ghost]

From the perspective of a fan of college athletics, can I ask, "What would change if the Michigan Wolverine football team was a minor league NFL franchise that played in a stadium on the University of Michigan campus and was 51% owned by the University of Michigan"?

The only real problem with this scenario is that there would be about 20 or so teams fielded.

[naum]

Even the small % of Division I schools that make money on athletics, most of that money is just shoveled back into the athletic departments. To pay for new (and upgraded) amenities enjoyed primarily by the infrastructure of scholarship granted athletes and staff, and not by the student body at large.

Granted, it's a been a few years since my college days (at state universities in PA), but even with the main sports being Division II, the wrestling program was Division I and nationally ranked in top 10 -- but resources poured in to separate dining facilities (where athletes dine on fine cuts of steak where the student body got generous helpings of frozen chicken patties and cheese curls), tutors for the scholarship athletes, facilities (like swimming pools and basketball courts) only open 2 hours a week for most students, etc.…

[Salamok]

I will never understand why college sports are such a big deal - universities exist to educate. If you want to play a sport while you're there, you can pay like the rest of adults do outside of a university setting.

When I lived in Fresno I pretty much agreed with you.  In Austin it is a different story, I really don't care about college sports or at this point in my life anything college related and yet somehow my life still seems to be enriched by the mere fact that UT and I are in the same city.  I also feel that if all college athletic programs were reduced to city college levels that even I (who pretty much doesn't give a shit) would feel the negative impact.

Austin has a lot going for it to be sure but a not insignificant factor in it's charm is that every child in the city and the majority of the state who wasn't raised by some die hard arch rival has to some extent a dream of going to UT.  This is quite refreshing compared to growing up in Fresno, where most students leave the city when presented with the opportunity as opposed to aspiring to go there.

[ghost]

UT is also a spectacular school that has a lot of money given to it that has absolutely nothing to do with sports.