A number of wise observers comment on the sublime and seductive FBS.
There’s some glamor. Arguably, there’s some payback. But the culture you’re inviting into your organization is problematic at best.
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[It has] the capacity to hurt a university’s hard-earned reputation in the blink of an eye.
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[M]ajor college football [is like] the credit-default swaps that wrecked the economy four years ago – risky and little understood investments that can blow up and hurt owners and innocent bystanders alike.
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FBS football is like a cancer cell implanted inside an institution – innocuous at first but growing into something destructive. Schools struggle to win initially and throw money at the team, alienating faculty whose own salaries are frozen. Gradually, the university loses control of the athletic program, and student-athletes suffer.
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“What do you think (new president) Rod Erickson is spending his time on at Penn State, any of those guys?” said John Burness, a former head of public affairs at several major universities, including Duke, where he saw a good year of work spent almost entirely dealing with the lacrosse case there.
“When you get involved in the negatives, the scandals, it’s such an enormous sinkhole of the time of the institutional leadership they almost can’t deal with anything else,” he said. “When schools start out no one is assuming there will be a problem. But there’s so much money involved in this, there are inevitably going to be problems.”