Not-for-Profit Watch
Congress is making noise about taking away bigtime college football and basketball's not-for-profit status, a status which rewards fat and corrupt programs with government subsidies.
I'd be surprised if anything happens along these lines anytime soon; but the congressional noise itself may draw people's attention to the ever-viler world of the major university teams.
Meanwhile, in an article pondering the subsidy, a money columnist at CNN notes a looming fiasco in university sports that'll have them taking even more than they already do from academics in order to stay in the game:
... [T]he current college football season will see an extra game, and for the major college programs, an extra 100,000 tickets being sold. [C]ollege basketball is squeezing in extra games as well. [C]onferences like the Big Ten [are] starting [their] own cable network.
But even with those efforts to grab more revenue, the pace of revenue growth has begun to slow.
Dan Fulks, an accounting professor for Translyvania University who is working as a consultant for the NCAA in its response to Ways & Means, said preliminary figures show that ticket sales and other revenue generated directly by Division 1-A football and basketball programs grew only 6 percent between 2003 and 2005, compared with 18.5 percent growth between 2001 and 2003.
Brand acknowledged in a speech at the National Press Club last week that partly due to slowing growth of ticket sales and other revenue, college sports is causing a greater financial drain on school budgets.
"As outside revenue growth for athletics begins to moderate at most institutions, the rate of budget growth has not always followed," he said. "In many instances, the result has been a need for increased support of athletics through institutional funds."
But Brand said the NCAA would face anti-trust problems if it tried to mandate spending limits on programs.
"And even if it were possible, universities and their boards would not be willing to have the NCAA dictate their expenditures; and they would be correct in doing so," he said. "Budgetary decisions properly belong at the campus level." [I'm afraid Mr. Brand is a little out of date. Schools are way past "decisions." They're at Shit we gotta do x y and z or we're dead.]
So with Congress and the NCAA both unlikely and/or unwilling to put any kind of serious curbs on spending, the arms race in college sports is likely to continue.
And the $3.6 billion a year that schools are estimated to be pouring into athletics to cover losses, even at many Division 1-A schools, is only going to grow, even as millions upon millions of dollars more are generated through ticket sales and television deals.
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