All for T. Boone!
So if it’s not for the money, or to spur applications, or to attract better students [studies show university sports accomplishes none of these things], what is the point of building big college sports programs, primarily football and basketball?
Here’s my unsurprising theory:
There are groups of alumni who are very passionate about their teams. I’m talking very passionate. They go to all the games or watch them on TV; they populate the online fans sites; they obsess over recruiting. They are very vocal when things aren’t going well for State U., and some of them sit on university boards, or in state legislatures, or belong to powerful alumni organizations. While their numbers as a percentage of all alums may not be large, they can make a lot of noise.
If they are UNC fans, they do not like losing to Duke. If they are N.C. State fans, they do not like losing to UNC.
Conformist Without a Cause.
I mean, beyond calling university researchers liars.
There they sit together, the state of Montana’s two university systems, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, both ranked #201 on the higher ed hit parade at US News.
201! You really have to give it the old college try to do that poorly. There really isn’t much lower you can go.
And, as is always the case, talking to the people in charge – particularly the trustees – grants insight into the grit, determination, and developmental delay that make Montana what it is.
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So this here reporter points out that Montana State and the University of Montana bleed students and taxpayers dry via immense subsidies for sports, and that of course all the money that goes to sports is money that doesn’t go to, you know, educating people. A thunderingly obvious point.
A guy who used to be a UM economics professor and is now a state senator has really “irked” one of the regents by making this point.
[Dick] Barrett … was reacting to news reports that inaccurately characterized the Montana University System’s college athletics as showing a $571,331 “profit.”
The word profit suggests the programs are self-supporting, Barrett said, and they are not.
“People shouldn’t operate under the misperception they support themselves,” Barrett said. When people attend games they should realize, he said, “Taxpayers are giving them a hand.
“My point is simple — that we should understand what it is, particularly at a time when resources are limited.”
At a time when UM faculty are arguing about budget priorities – when some professors assert the university has disproportionately cut the humanities while funding top-heavy administration — “it struck me as odd,” Barrett said, “that funding for athletics has not become part of the discussion.”
Barrett called “bogus” the regents’ argument that millions of dollars in tuition waivers for athletes shouldn’t be counted as subsidies because no cash changes hands.
Tuition waivers for athletics totaled $8 million last year for all campuses, including $2.8 million at MSU, according to Frieda Houser, University System director of accounting and budget.
The university could have decided to “sacrifice revenue” in other ways, Barrett said. “It could decide not to charge other students as high a tuition.
“Students are subsidizing athletics, not just in their (athletics) fee, but they have to pay higher tuition so athletes can pay lower tuition,” he said.
That’s not the only bogus regents’ argument.
The regents … argued that the dollar amount listed on Montana’s NCAA reports as “direct state or other government support” for athletics programs is zero.
It’s zero, one administrator explained later, because under the Montana Constitution, the Legislature doesn’t approve money for specific university programs like athletics, but instead sends a lump sum to the Board of Regents.
Oh. Alright then.
PLUS, the whole other defense of athletics is, hell, you know, it just generates one heck of a great atmosphere …
What can a new chancellor do (the last one was booted out after his university’s self-righteousness about its academic integrity ran hard up against its decades of bogus courses) but mouth comforting cliches about past wrongs and glorious futures?
That very unhealthy atmosphere of mistrust thing is interesting. It refers to the fact that now all professors at Chapel Hill are, like marine recruits, subject to spot checks to make sure that they’re actually meeting their classes. Apparently they’re no longer trusted to be doing that…
Yet the reality of recent history at Chapel Hill is that everyone from the trustees and the chancellor on down trusted that no real classes were being offered across a number of departments; they trusted that in this way their revenue athletes would be kept on the field and undistracted by mere academics.
It’s so totally part of the tradition of big-time athletics that now somehow it’s the legitimate faculty at Chapel Hill who have to be folded in to the shit stew cooked up by the athletics department and the university’s administration. Now, because of the money cynicism of provosts and trustees, actual professors are treated like sneaks and fakes. There’s no better demonstration of the way big-time sports destroys the very heart of universities.
But no worries! The new chancellor assures us that she’s nailed 95 theses to the library door, all about how icky and corrupt academics at the university used to be, but now that they’ve done the 95 thingies it’s all great.
… it seems a little odd that Colorado State University is apparently about to impose extreme budget cuts.
A professor at CSU Pueblo sent out an email complaining about the cuts in colorful language (he called the chancellor a “hitman”) and promptly had his university email closed down (it has recently been restored). He probably faces other forms of punishment.
Go here for all the familiar stupid obscene reasons a school in CSU Pueblo’s position is part of a system building a new stadium (scroll down).
And when you’ve finished reading, wonder not at the rage that produced the “hitman” email.
Tetched in the head University of Tennessee (follow its mad sports program here) is now, after years of medically unsupervised activity, in unbelievably deep shit.
… [F]our losing seasons in the last five years, and home attendance has steadily declined… Tennessee fired Derek Dooley following this past season and owes him $5 million. That’s after paying Phillip Fulmer a $6 million buyout (over 48 months) when he was forced out following the 2008 season.
… Tennessee’s reserves have been depleted by $21 million in transfers back to the university over the last three years and $11.4 million in buyouts to fired coaches in football, basketball and baseball, as well as administrators. Former Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton walked away in 2011 with a $1.335 million buyout.
That $11.4 million figure doesn’t count the $5 million owed to Dooley, nor an additional $2 million to his assistants.
It’s worse than that. The reeling drunks running the show have much more public cash than that dribbling out of their mouths. Plus we can anticipate plenty of player scandals and all that Chapel Hill stuff…
What to do?
Well, if you’re the University of Tennessee I tell you what. You do one thing and one thing only: RUN AWAY!!!! You’ve made your bed; now you have to …
RUN AWAY!!!!!!!
Don’t nobody get to watch us whiles we chew the fat ’bout our next move: A new stadium, fire the next coach and give him a ten million dollar buyout… We’re runnin’ the joint see and we do it our way and fuck you all.
A board that makes recommendations about the direction of the University of Tennessee’s athletic department reversed a longstanding policy last year, leading to closed-door meetings, little written documentation and questions from the press and transparency advocates… Transparency advocates counter that the university is a public institution, and its doings should be public record. The fact that two athletic board members are also on UT’s Board of Trustees caught the eye of the Tennessee Press Association’s Frank Gibson.
Lots of this stuff coming out now.
Whether he realizes it or not, my son likes watching football for the same reason I did: because it’s intimate time with his dad. If I didn’t let watching football become one of the things we shared, if I told him it’s something I regret, he might take to it anyway. But it would be less likely. And if he made it to adulthood without heartwarming memories of sitting alongside his old man watching other men pulverize their bodies and minds, he’d be more able to rationally decide whether professional football is something a decent society should allow.
All my life I’ve heard that women are irrational.
Baby, women don’t know from irrational.
This of course is the deepest nightmare of every jock-school trustee and president. It’s much deeper than current worries about tanking ticket sales. You can still maybe bell-and-whistle tanking ticket sales; you can imagine ways of turning a stadium into, I don’t know, something that in significant ways resembles a really plush, high-tech, Las Vegas gambling hall/hotel/restaurant. But you can’t change the system of recruitment and cheating; you can’t stop the fact that Florida State University’s revenue-athlete graduation rate is a sick joke, or that the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, qua academic institution, is a sick joke. Lying and cheating your way around this problem is starting not to work. That’s the nightmare. Because the guy making the comment in my headline is saying that he can’t identify with the people playing on the gridiron anymore; that he feels like a jerk trying to pretend they are part of the college world.
Eventually the remnant true believers will trickle down, as it were, to the south, where the few locations that have always been honest about being football stadiums and nothing else (Auburn, Clemson, Alabama) will continue to stage games. Eventually most of the audience for the games will be like the tourists who go to “Old West” towns to watch pretend shoot-outs.
A commenter at the Charleston Gazette rebukes a columnist who dared question a planned six million dollar “auditorium to help inspire [the West Virginia University] football team.” I’m sure what set the commenter off was this:
The primary purpose of a university is to educate students — including football players.
Does anyone think educating the dudes will turn around humongous loser WVU football?
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Background on this jewel in the American university crown here (scroll down).
If universities and the NCAA continue to cling to an amateurism model that limits the earnings potential of top college athletes, all of that new television revenue must go somewhere.
“If you’re not going to pay players,” said Brian Goff, a professor of economics at Western Kentucky who has studied the business of college sports. “that money is going to try to find ways to entice players” to come to your school.
It’s weird that you never hear Tea Party people complaining that their education taxes are on top of so much sports-generated revenue that their state universities can’t figure out what to do with it… Wouldn’t you expect some proud Kentuckian to ask Why is our state university so shitty when it gets so much of our money? When it generates so much of its own money that heck it don’t know what to do with it?
The front porch of some of our greatest universities.
Life of the mind, America, 2014.
That was the kind of game it was. Rough and angry and so violent that at times it was hard to watch.
This, of course, is part of the attraction of football. And part of the reason so many players leave the sport crippled and concussed.
Richard Sherman made the big play Sunday. His team is going to the Super Bowl.
More important, he survived the carnage.
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UD thanks David.