The first signal Division I’s dashboard indicators project [Cute name, and UD's just able to make out that it has something to do with cars.] has revealed is that the “check engine” light is on. Athletics spending is progressing at a rate three times that of overall university spending — a pace presidents and chancellors know is not sustainable in the long run. [The piece is about to announce a new service for member universities -- the NCAA will provide schools with comparative sports spending numbers from the other schools. Note that the piece does begin with a seeming acknowledgment of problems in bigtime university spending on athletics. But, typical of bath salt writing, it will do this only in order to calm readers' fears as the piece progresses.]

While the blinking beacon may be alarming to some, others are reassured [The calming process begins.] that the NCAA’s collaboration with the National Association of College and University Business Officers to produce a uniform data-reporting system and provide dashboard indicators that allow for peer comparison will serve as a financial GPS for big-time intercollegiate athletics. [Note the hokey playing out of the dashboard metaphor.]

The dashboards, which are expected to be finalized in spring 2008, are to fiscal responsibility as the APR is to academic reform. [This sentence exemplifies the to be verb problem in writing, about which SOS has written in greater detail here. In one sentence, the writer has given us four instances of is: are, to be, are, is. It makes for a dull and wordy sentence. Rewrite it something like this: The dashboards, due in spring 2008, are a kind of APR of fiscal responsibility. Your reader knows what APR means.] They are benchmarks developed on a by-campus basis that provide presidents, athletics directors and university CFOs the most comprehensive, accurate and comparable data to date that inform decisions about athletics spending.

That means Kent State can compare itself to its Mid-American Conference peers in its reliance upon university-allocated funds as a percentage of the total athletics budget. Texas Tech can see where it ranks among Big 12 schools in football revenues. Duke can run a comparison with other private institutions on athletics giving. Oregon can determine its percentile in revenues via ticket sales. Illinois can stack up against other traditional basketball powers in facility investment. A Football Championship Subdivision institution can see the investment it takes to reclassify to the Football Bowl Subdivision. [This is a good paragraph, with varied prose and rich examples. It mentions one of UD's favorites, Texas Tech, where four of every ten annual debt service dollars repays loans for athletics facilities. Texas Tech's program just emptied its reserve fund because of a multi-million dollar deficit.]

In other words, the dashboards can be all things to all schools. Simply put, it is the best customized financial data Division I has ever had, and the system is being applauded by those who will use it. [We're living in the best of all possible worlds. It's not as if many of the schools mentioned in this article are, like Texas Tech, ancient hulking sports factories with almost no interest in academics, schools who'll be made so anxious about this new data about what their rivals are spending that they'll add a few more catastrophic athletic expenditures to the ones they've already made. No -- things are great, and they'll be made greater by the dashboard indicators.]

“We do a lot of benchmarking at the institutional level,” said Michigan State University’s Kathy Lindahl, the school’s vice president for financial administration. “The dashboard project for athletics has tremendous potential in that it gives you instant validation as to whether you are ahead of the curve, behind it or in the ballpark. The data bring athletics to a level of sophistication that universities are accustomed to in other areas of the campus.” [Machine-generated prose, with an eerie manufactured enthusiasm thrown in... Oh, and here's another example of this sort of prose...]

... “Presidents are deeply engaged in benchmarking in every other aspect of our work — why not in athletics?” University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher said. “We are creating a system for accountability for the value added of a college degree, a system about what students are learning from their general studies program and a system about the degree to which students are satisfied with their college experience. We are using national instrumentation to probe those areas, so the idea of a common data set for gauging the return on our investment in athletics is just as important.” [Gauging what's going on -- financially, legally, morally, academically -- in most of bigtime university athletics isn't about dashboards. It's about sledgehammers. Texas Tech doesn't need sophisticated instrumentation to know it's got its head up its ass.]


...“The kind of change we’re talking about will be more incremental than revolutionary,” said University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Chancellor James Moeser, who as a Task Force member helped draft the white paper on the dashboard project. “But we are giving leaders the tools to make more informed decisions. It’s up to every president and chancellor to use them in their own situations.” [This overlooks the fact that presidents and chancellors, at many of these schools, have little to no power over athletics.]

...“There will be a lot more conversation between the athletics department and our vice chancellor for financial administration than there has been in the past, for example,” Moeser said. “And there will be more regular presentations by athletics to the budget committee.” [Uh-huh.]

... Task Force members acknowledge the possibility that the additional data may in fact fuel the perceived arms race in athletics [Note the word "perceived." It's not perceived. It's actual.] rather than douse the flame, but most of them downplay the concern [Bath salt prose. No cause for alarm! Keep doing what you've been doing!], saying that more accurate data beats little or unreliable information.

... Others, though, think the dashboards will prompt institutions in the upper echelon to hit cruise control and some in the lower half to step on the gas.

“Large governing bodies are guilty of that kind of behavior, and you can’t help it,” said Katie Hill, a senior associate athletics director at Clemson University. “You presume that everyone’s decision-making is based on the global good. It’s not. Does our government scale back spending because the national budget is out of hand? No. Does our national debt keep us from borrowing from China? No. We’ve heard the expression that all politics are local — well, all athletics decisions are local, too. It’s about what our universities, our athletics departments, and our fans and supporters expect from us.” [Writer sticks the truth of the situation at the end of the piece -- things like dashboard indicators hasten the trend in which schools like the University of Texas maintain obscenely over-funded sports programs, and smaller schools destroy themselves trying to keep up. The writer gives us another paragraph insisting this worry is groundless, and then he concludes the piece.]

Labels: SOS