Big time. No question. And not just the University of Kentucky administration:
… UK’s basketball and football teams and their boosters … are rich and powerful and prone to trouble. [The programs] bring in a lot of money, and some of it goes to academics. But not nearly enough.
Sports are fun and exciting diversions. But at UK, as at many universities, athletics has become the tail that wags the dog.
[UK’s] rabid fans … think the university exists to support a sports franchise, rather than the other way around.
Basically everyone at UK is way dedicated to football (plus basketball, natch). The school’s academic ranking shows it: 112 in 2007; 129 today. Rah.
Still… with the whole nation lately beginning to absent itself from university football games, UK is no exception.
The weather forecast for tomorrow [UK vs Vanderbilt; UK won] is gorgeous; lower level tickets can be purchased for $20; and Kentucky is expected to win its first SEC game since 2011. So what’s the problem?
Last year’s average attendance in Commonwealth Stadium was 59,742, roughly 8,000 more than what we’re currently looking at for tomorrow.
This writer warns darkly of “ramifications down the road,” and we know what that is. Expect that academic ranking number to improve if UK’s not careful…
Add to this the fact that the sport itself is so spectacularly grody that it is “referred to in the news and by late-night comedians as a national shame,” as one professor notes (read this Guardian article from which the quotation is taken only if you get a kick out of witnessing car wrecks) and a university almost exclusively devoted to sport has its work cut out for it.