The unpleasant tendency of newspapers to cite statistics – and put them in high-profile editorials – has yet again reared its ugly head. The Boston Globe casts a rational eye at the U Mass football program and makes the obvious call: kill it.
So, you know, here’s the paper of record for that team’s city saying shut it down.
UMass had to assure many more football scholarships, meet minimum attendance requirements, and make facility improvements. But instead of leaping into glory, UMass hurled itself into a money pit. A program that cost the school $3.1 million in 2011 in direct support and student fees is projected to cost $8.6 million next year — even after projected revenues are taken into account — according a recently released faculty report. The school has precious little to show for it, with a 5-31 record in the last three years and a fan base in suspended animation. The Minutemen averaged 16,008 fans this season, barely more than last year’s home game average of 15,830.
Pushing athletes to enhance the university’s brand on the field often leads to problems in the classroom, and that pattern held true at UMass Amherst.
… Football losses are nearing $10 million a year… [T]axpayers can’t be expected to pay for an extravagant football program indefinitely, especially as the changing economics of college football make it even more expensive for UMass to stay competitive.
Franchement, here’s the worry on the part of the school. U Mass Amherst has arguably the most violent student body in America. The post-game riots there are terrifying. But if you take away that important emotional outlet for the large numbers of drunken bullies who go to school there, who knows what they’ll do instead? (Put amherst in my search engine for many posts about that school’s long history of riots.)
Sigh.
Read more about the Mass Morass here.
Programs that bleed money schools could use to educate their students; programs that feature games in huge expensive stadiums full of nobody in the stands; programs that have brought academic shame, ridicule, and corruption to their universities; programs that…
You know the drill.
Among several such freak shows in this country, some stand out as truly pathological in their drive to debase themselves. One of these is the University of Massachusetts, haunt of hopeless teams, gaping stadiums, and marauding students.
Now most professors, as I’ve noted before, cultivate a studied indifference toward the loud non-stop foulness big-time sports brings to their campus; but at places like U Mass things have a tendency to get so repulsive that eventually, for a few professors, repression fails. Like take for instance Max Page (here’s his cool website). Page is a real misfit at U Mass – a seriously educated, reflective, activist intellectual. He’ll surely leave the campus soon. But meanwhile he is making one hell of a fuss about the sports program there. He co-chaired a faculty committee on football, and made a little speech about the game to his colleagues.
Page … said “There are far, far better uses for these millions of dollars.”
He went on to describe the current state of UMass football as a “failure of epic proportions” …
“I want to have everyone be aware about promises about the future costs, given that none of the promises have been realized, in terms of the costs,” Page said. “Attendance is far below what was promised. The revenues are much lower than expected. The team has not performed well, and the coach, some have argued, has behaved even worse. And the move to Gillette (Stadium) – the ace in the hole of this effort – has been a resounding disappointment, to say the least.
“How much of our precious resources and our tax dollars and our student tuition dollars should we waste on the enterprise?” he continued. “Is it $10 million? Is it $20 million? It’s it $50 million? You should ask yourself ‘What is the point at which you say enough is enough?'”
Well, let’s see. What has, say, another big public university, Penn State, had to pay out lately because of its football program? There’s a running tally. UD has been following it. The latest reports have put it at $171 million.… But no, that’s not fair. That’s just the scandal. The scandal has cost that much so far. The football program’s a whole other thing.
I’m sure U Mass football will never generate any scandals. The only, uh, outside cost U Mass football consistently produces is post-riot clean-up bills.
Neither of these activities has anything to do with going to football games.
U Mass drinkers long ago abandoned the middle man, if you will, and went directly at the alcohol poisoning.
It’s logical. Drinking in a stadium is expensive. Your team will probably lose, and alcohol is already a depressant. Stadiums have no cars to tip.
So why did anyone think U Mass students would haul ass across the state and attend their school’s football games?
Many U Mass alumni (who live closer to the stadium) have exactly the same profile as the students they used to be. Why would they go?
Here are two articles rehearsing these well-known facts and wondering why the taxpayers of Massachusetts let the people who run U Mass do such stupid, stupid things.
But what’s wonderful about these articles is that they make the connection between the new U Mass law school and the stadium fiasco.
UMass spending millions on an unprofitable and pricey venture is nothing new. The launch of the UMass law school a couple of years ago harkens [SOS alert: Harkens is awkward. Actually, it’s wrong. Harken is a verb meaning pay attention. Perhaps the writer had the idiom “harks back to” in mind – the law school puts one in mind of the football fiasco. I’d simply say demonstrates.] the same fiscal irresponsibility. With an overabundance of lawyer[s] graduating law school facing a historically anemic job market for attorneys, the idea was a waste of resources.
(The writer doesn’t even mention that the first president of the new law school was fired for credit card misuse.)
It’s important to grasp the synergy here, as these writers do. Taxachusetts indeed.
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UD thanks Andre.
A couple of economists go there.
[M]any prominent universities would lose their main claim to fame. Alabama and LSU produce a large amount of revenue and notoriety from football without much in the way of first-rate academics to back it up. Schools would have to compete more on academics to be nationally prominent, which would again boost American education.
Or those schools might become what UD predicts (economists aren’t the only people who can make predictions!) the University of Massachusetts will become: Exclusively online institutions.
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UD thanks Dave.
I mean, the latest anxious freshman eighteen year old preparing to mass kill if he failed to get into a frat made a point of leaving gun-unfriendly Boston (where he went to a real expensive private school) and coming to Highpoint University in North Carolina because, he explained to the authorities, it’s easier to get guns in that state. Acquaintances from the private school recall his obsession with guns and mass killing; he clearly made a logical decision to move to a place where – unlike Massachusetts – that would be easy. Crazed reject loner mass killers like the guy down the street at the University of North Carolina Charlotte last April just seem drawn to North Carolina, whose state motto appears on this shirt…
“It’s going to continue to drain money from the core mission of the university. And there’s no end in sight. How many years do we do this?” keens a University of Massachusetts professor as the school’s ignorant padded armies clash by night…
It’s gotten quite lyrical, this national chorus of professors lamenting the tragic infinitude of university football — or, as the latest installment in Bloomberg’s series on the subject has it, “Football is Forever.” The author of the series points out that
Once a school fields a top-division football team, it’s nearly impossible to reverse the commitment.
I can’t go on, I’ll go on would be the more modern, tragicomic, version of this classic truth: The morally and financially rancid circus of big-time university football (toss in basketball, of course) cannot be dismantled. Eight times a year an addled elephant will be made to balance on its back legs in front of four rich drunks in the luxury suites and forty poor drunks in the bleachers, plus there’s the police and the littering tailgaters and the clean-up crew and that’s all folks. That’s the show. It struts its stuff forever and forever, signifying nothing, but royally fucking over your university.
A local commentator in Oklahoma says there’s almost nothing in that state “to cheer for.” He says that by almost any quality of life standard Oklahoma looks terrible.
Instead of asking what in l’esprit d’Oklahome might account for this outcome, the writer proceeds to thank the state’s lucky stars for its football teams.
OU and OSU football have become sources of state pride at a time you can scarcely find them anywhere else.
But… Shouldn’t the guy be asking how it was that Oklahoma got stuck with 70,000 square miles of meh plus two university football teams?
Ask any chancellor, elected official or traveling businessperson and they’ll tell you — nothing has a bigger impact on the perception of universities or the states in which they educate than their sports teams. In Oklahoma, that means their football teams.
The general perception of Oklahoma, for reasons the writer lists (terrible schools, horrible health indicators, over-full prisons… he didn’t have time to mention stuff like the fact that the state’s senior senator showed climate change is a hoax by bringing a snowball to the senate chamber), is bad. If football teams had the biggest impact imaginable on the public perception of a state, Oklahoma would be right up there with Massachusetts and its… university football teams?
I mean I dunno. Some problems with logic here.
[T]here is nothing funny about playing [University of Massachusetts] home games in sprawling but nearly vacant Gillette Stadium …
Au contraire, the situation at U Mass, with its new law school (LOLOLOLOL) and way gussied up football program and ongoing tradition of student rioting, etc., etc., is hilarious.
Those who criticized the [football program’s] upgrade were ridiculed in 2011 as small-minded, anti-football or lacking in school spirit. Nearly five years later, everything they warned about has come true: low attendance, a nomadic existence that includes games at a cavernous stadium too distant for students to attend, spiraling costs…
A university composed of nomads wandering to cavernous stadiums. That’s funny.
As another uncertain offseason begins … the questions about the expanded, much more expensive UMass football program continue to be less about where they should play FBS football, but why.
Why? Let me help you with that one. I quote an earlier University Diaries post:
U Mass Amherst has arguably the most violent student body in America. The post-game riots there are terrifying. But if you take away that important emotional outlet for the large numbers of drunken bullies who go to school there, who knows what they’ll do instead?
You wouldn’t want the mobs going after the (shudder) professors, would you? Who’d teach the courses?
University Diaries has followed the very strange public university system of Massachusetts for quite some time. Virtually all of its campuses clamor for attention. There’s the pointless bankrupting football program, the drunk and violent students… and, of course, the spanking new law school.
Yes. Law school. New law school. In the current climate for lawyers, U Mass opened, just a few years ago, a new law school.
Everyone with half a brain tried shouting it down, but up it went, with all sorts of cretinous promises (“the state would even earn a profit as enrollment was projected to more than double by 2017″). Its first president was quickly fired for financial malfeasance. It’s almost four million dollars in debt, and it’s shrinking its enrollment. Plus it’s not yet accredited.
UD is speechless.
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UD thanks Andre.
That’s a nice gentlemanly way to put it. A member of America’s most homicidal university fraternity (its body count puts even FAMU’s Merry Manslaughterers to shame) fails, in his comment in this post’s headline, to register the difference between bad things happening to you (adversity) and bad people killing you (murder, manslaughter, via hazing). Maybe this …. I dunno… call it moral aphasia… accounts for the fact that despite the truckload of bodies Sigma Alpha Epsilon has racked up, its members continue to perceive it as a fashioner of gentlemen… They’re constantly using the word gentlemen in talking about the place…
UD‘s take on this is what you’d expect. She understands that men in certain sorts of groups will always want to torture and kill each other. She fails to see why this activity should take place at universities, on campus or off. Attaching the word “gentlemen” to this activity has a nice rough irony to it, and UD is alive to this fun use of language. But it doesn’t really take you very far, again, in the direction of universities.
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Now, as universities become desperate about declining enrollments and that big ol’ loan to pay back on the new stadium, they will certainly be tempted, like the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to specialize in admitting all the violent gentlemen no other university wants. Big ol’ gangs of them, year after year, to bond and riot and haze. Like Zoo Mass (update on its AMAZING football team, football conference, game attendance, and stadium choices, here), these schools will get a reputation, and all the gentlemen in the vicinity will make a point of attending them.
In the not too distant future, Richie Incognito will be the president of a university.
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But back to Sigma whatever. Talk about adversity. Even a bank as astoundingly scummy as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase finds this frat too scummy to do business with.
Early this month, JPMorgan Chase stopped managing an investment account for a prominent client: the charitable foundation of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the nation’s largest fraternities.
The bank was concerned about SAE’s bad publicity, according to Anthony Alberico, a JPMorgan vice president who dealt with the foundation. SAE has had 10 deaths linked to drinking, drugs and hazing since 2006, more than any other fraternity.
“If JPMorgan is going to turn us down, who’s next?” said Bradley Cohen, SAE’s national president. “What if universities start saying SAE’s not welcome?”
Well. There’s always Goldman Sachs.
But in the world of big-time sports, who listens to them? What do you think this is, an institution of higher learning?
UD has told you about U Mass (gruesome posts aplenty here), so you aren’t surprised that this absurdity has now fired at great expense their new coach, and will soon hire at great expense another new coach. No one comes to the games, so it’s not clear to whom this activity has any relevance.
Oh yeah. U Mass professors. And I guess students.
… I’ve wanted the University of Southern Mississippi (you owe it to yourself to read the entire article, plus the letter at the end) to be stupider than the University of Massachusetts. I’ve assumed that that deep south school would obviously be dumber than a school in my enlightened part of the country.
Yet they’re actually neck and neck. They’re actually destroying themselves at the same rate, for the same reason. They’re both sports fuck-ups.
6,385 people showed up for U Mass’s most recent football game — played far from campus in Gillette Stadium (where the big boys play!), which offers 68,756 seats.
So let’s see. UD stinks at math, but… 6,385 / 68,756… That’s, uh (pause for phone call to Mr UD) … 9.3%!!!
OR (pause for visit to Percentage Calculator) … that’s 9.2864622723835%!!!!
Of course, “students and taxpayers [are] picking up the tab.”
General Subbaswamy has announced from his bunker that “we haven’t completely mobilized the alumni yet.” His last job was at the University of Kentucky, so he knows university sports.
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UD thanks Andre.
He writes an opinion piece in the school newspaper protesting the destruction of the university by athletics.
You’d think newspapers at Auburn and Clemson and Georgia and Montana and all of the other American universities degraded by big-time sports would feature similar professors – committed, responsible people capable of tracking and analyzing the deterioration and writing about it. Hell, many of these people have tenure, a level of job security unimaginable to most people. But – as UD discussed in what seems to have become her most famous column – for a variety of reasons, they don’t say anything.
Rutgers is an exception. William C. Dowling – a Rutgers English professor – wrote a 2007 book about how sports has long undone, and continues to undo, Rutgers. And now, with things far, far worse than when Dowling’s book came out, an economics professor there – Mark Killingworth – has described the ongoing (and, old UD will guess, ultimately failed) effort to “clean up” after its athletics mess.
A New York Times article about Dowling was written in 2007, when things looked way cool at Rutgers athletics. The author writes that “the number of undergraduate applications has risen along with Rutgers’s sporting fortunes, as have annual donations to the university.”
Really? Here’s Killingworth, 2012:
[B]ig-time University athletics hasn’t attracted more first-year students with high SAT scores, and hasn’t raised our “yield” (percentage of accepted applicants who actually attend), relative to peer institutions. Our academic rankings are sliding steadily downwards, and for two years running, our enormous athletic subsidies have landed us in the Wall Street Journal’s “football grid of shame.” This isn’t “building the brand” — it’s making us a punchline.
What happened to all them big donations and big smart students?
See, this is something sports factories don’t want to parse for you, but getting more jerks to apply to your school because they want to get pissed and join the fun is not a good trend. The state of Massachusetts has set up the University of Massachusetts Amherst to take those students.
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Killingworth touches on the Rutgers board of trustees. He is far too kind, merely asking them to “rethink their priorities.” No. They are the people who killed Rutgers. Like Penn State’s trustees (UD predicts all or most of them will resign in the coming months) they should be booted. Instead of holding the university in their trust and working toward its benefit, they shat on it and created the absolute failure Killingworth describes. Out they go.