One reason [Colorado State University] pushed so hard to play an annual game against [the University of Colorado] in Denver was the potential ticket revenue. Sports Authority Field at Mile High, where the Denver Broncos play their home games, holds more than double the 32,500-seat capacity of CSU’s Hughes Stadium.

CSU could bring in more than $1 million in revenue, Kowalczyk said, even after game expenses are deducted, if it were to sell its full allotment of tickets. Instead, the school won’t come close to its budgeted goal of $800,000 in ticket revenue from this game.

But… we could have brought in more than a million… if we’d sold the tickets…!

A 2010 report showed more than $800 million in student fees were used to subsidize athletic programs annually, he said. Vanderbilt spends $10 million-$15 million a year to support its athletics program — at a cost of $2,000-$3,000 per student each year, [Vanderbilt economics professor John] Siegfried said.

That may explain why schools with Division I teams tend to charge higher tuition than those without such teams, he said.

Studies also have shown schools with Division I teams don’t receive significantly more student applications than those that don’t have such teams, he said.

So why did 109 universities upgrade their sports programs to higher divisions in the 1990s?

“Are they all stupid?” Siegfried said. “I don’t think so.”

Big-time sports programs have been shown to generate sports-related media attention for universities. Schools with Division I football programs also typically receive 8 percent more from their respective states by way of financial support, he said.

Schools with sports teams that have winning records typically see higher attendance at sports events, he said. However, they also often feel compelled to pay their coaches competitive salaries, a problem Siegfried called the “prisoner’s dilemma.”

“All that happens is they get paid more and more and more,” he said of coaches.

Ol’ T. Boone must be pissed. I mean, this is Oklahoma State, people! T. Boone who, with all his money and influence, really runs the team … really runs the school… endows OSU with yet another amazing gift: a huge new stadium! And the team is winning games!

But they can’t sell out the stadium.

… the University of New Mexico, has finally fired football coach Mike Locksley. Can’t win a game; does all sorts of embarrassing shit when not losing games.

Why did it take them so long?

After New Mexico completed another 1-11 season last year, the Lobos decided to retain him — in part because they could not afford the $1.4 million buyout to his contract.

But take heart, UNM. Dave Schmidly is still president!

… even for the inside guys.

Former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese, his heart aching over the death of Dave Gavitt, Big East founder and his best friend, went on ESPN and WFAN the other day with all emotional guns blazing. He said college athletics is controlled by football, money and greed. He called it absolute chaos. He said that until two years ago he would have argued that college presidents had loyalty and integrity. Not anymore.

… have columns facing one another and playing off one another nicely. The Social Contract, headlines Krugman; The Amateur Ideal, headlines Brooks. Both writers want to say that in some realms of life capitalism’s competitive market ethos should be suspended; that, underlying all of the purely financial contracting among us, a social contract impels us to act in self-sacrificing ways for the good of the polity.

David Brooks regards the university as one of the most social contracty places in America, and well he might. Universities are non-profits, enjoying immense tax and other advantages, because the state defines them as privileged locations of social good. Unlike the justly detested for-profit schools, universities aren’t in it to make a buck. They’re dedicated to educating people. Brooks even thinks they have a moral mission:

As many universities have lost confidence in their ability to instill character, the moral mission of the university has withered.

UD understands how religious schools might perceive themselves as having explicitly moral missions (Catholic Seton Hall, for example, despite having had to blast more imprisoned alumni names off of buildings than any other school in America, and having hired one of the foulest coaches known to humankind, presumably sees itself in this way.) but she does not believe the non-religious university has – or should have – a moral mission. See Clifford Orwin for a nice expression of her views.

Brooks says what he says about withering because he, like everyone else, sees the amoral hypercapitalist joke amateur university sports (basketball and football, that is) has become. He laments, in a pointless way, the withering of the character-rich amateur university sports tradition. Couldn’t we bring that back? Its “lingering vestiges”? Even in the face of billion dollar tv contracts?

Lingering vestiges. Aren’t they kind of like whispering hope? Durn pretty language. But really.

How is Brooks going to gather up and preserve the lingering vestiges? Reverse the ten-year, billion-dollar contracts? Has Brooks noticed what the most popular major in America is? It’s business. Brooks doesn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the American student:

College basketball is more thrilling than pro basketball because the game is still animated by amateur passion, not coldly calculating professional interests.

No – it’s thrilling because it’s played by essentially professional players who are really good. And listen: Who spouts moral mission language at the university? It really isn’t faculty, or even administration. It’s precisely the clever sports programs. Go there – to your six-million-dollar coaches and money-under-the-table boosters – for all of the moral mission, character-building language you can stomach. UD‘s been there – at a host of university sports conferences – and she’s heard it all. If Brooks wants to play right into the hands of Nick Saban he can go on gassing about moral character. Nick’s right there with you. He’s been there waiting for you.

Until we can pivot our eyes back to what universities are – intellectual institutions – we’re going to stay all misty-eyed as Nick Saban and Jim Calhoun (Coach sets an example, you know! Here’s one of Calhoun’s hero recruits. Really made good. Lectures British civil servants! All because of the early example set by the richest public employee in the state of Connecticut!) lecture us on how universities are places that make us better men.

I’ll write about Krugman in a moment.

Just where do the pesky buggers go?

Well, whether it’s OSU, or any seriously sporty American university, it’s about lawsuits. (Can you imagine how many University of Miami tuition dollars are going to lawyers and public relations people and penalties and all?) The stinkier the program, the higher the cost of covering the stinkiness, or, when the smell escapes, trying to pay your way out of the malodor-closet.

Ever since Brother Tressel had his cover blown, OSU has been spending mightily along these lines. Among their many outlays: Dealing with an ESPN public records lawsuit.

ESPN stated in the lawsuit that producers at the sporting news network had made several public records requests for all emails sent or received by President E. Gordon Gee, athletic director Gene Smith, compliance officer Doug Archie and former head coach Jim Tressel, that included the keyword “Sarniak.”

Ted Sarniak is a businessman in Jeanette, Pa., closely associated with former OSU quarterback Terrelle Pryor.

… In addition to documents containing the word “Sarniak,” ESPN also requested several documents without success. ESPN said some of their requests were wrongfully denied for being overly broad.

And OSU said… and then ESPN said… For every “said,” add ten thousand or so dollars.

Sell the college programs to the leagues with which they already do business. Sell college football to the NFL and the television networks for $25 billion and a cut of all future revenues. Same with basketball and the NBA. Let the leagues oversee player development and safety and training. Pay players in the same manner as minor league baseball players. As a condition of service, all players get an irrevocable academic scholarship to be applied whenever and wherever they choose, toward any degree from an AA to an MD.

“Tailgates are the core of this school in the fall.”

… just-released report about the real slave class in big time university athletics. These are the professors and academic tutors who devote themselves to play-acting the student part of the student-athlete. Shadowy simulacra sacrificing themselves for the good of the team, mentors/assistants/helpers (they go by many names) often do more than write papers and attend classes for the guys. One of them at the University of North Carolina paid thousands of dollars in parking tickets for a player.

Despite the large, one-time payment being made by credit card just one day before UNC attempted to [interview the tutor about academic fraud], University officials say they did not know about the [player’s] parking tickets until November 2010.

“The University learned this information during a separate review of parking citations received by football student athletes in response to media requests for records under the North Carolina Public Records Act,” the response states.

Those records, for which The Daily Tar Heel [the UNC student paper] and other media outlets sued, showed UNC football players racked up 395 tickets totaling more than $13,000 in a three-and-a-half year span.

One of the additional monitoring measures UNC has now imposed is a biweekly report of student-athlete parking citations from UNC’s Department of Public Safety.

LOL. The Biweekly Student-Athlete Parking Citations Report. This is going to crowd out the biweekly student-athlete police citations report.

Plus, in response to rampant cheating via tutors, here’s what UNC’s going to do:

… UNC has abandoned the academic mentor program, imposed additional constraints to student athletes and their tutors or learning assistants, increased the budget to hire and retain tutors and to expand rules education for tutors, among other corrective actions.

That academic mentor program sounded so good… academic… good… mentor… good… But now they have to trash it! What are they going to put in its place? What are they going to call it? Academic Enactor Program? Meanwhile they’re going to “expand rules education for tutors.”

What about rules education for professors, like this guy?

The author of the much-discussed long Atlantic article about paying college athletes sends a comment to University Diaries:

Big universities are addicted to sports money, but not because it helps the academic budget. Nearly all athletic departments have such enormous expenses that they run deficits, not surpluses, covered partly by involuntary student fees. I quoted unversity presidents saying forthrightly that sports are an unsustainable obsession at the expense of academics.

We are the only country in the world that hosts big-time sports in higher education. You seek to divorce sports from academics to preserve the latter. The two may well be incompatible, but we have not yet even begun an honest debate on that question because the NCAA has reform efforts mesmerized by phony issues of amateurism.

UD thanks Branch for the comment. She agrees that in important ways her railing against big time sports is a kind of throat-clearing for the real argument that can only ensue when things get de-mesmerized.

Who knows . . . maybe we’ll even succeed in impressing Margaret Soltan.

… the University of Oklahoma.

[T]he OU board approved a raise for football coach Bob Stoops before it got around to giving the school president authority to break its commitment to the Big 12. Stoops had been trying to get by on only $4.9 million a year in Norman.

… yet another telling of the scandalous story of university football and basketball. The New Yorker headlines its bland review of current big time campus sports

THE END OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL?

Which has a distinctly New York Daily News ring to it. What happened to the New Yorker?

Fans don’t care as long as the games are played, universities as long as the television contracts are renewed…

****************************************************

Andrew Zimbalist says that Taylor Branch is wrong about college presidents running the NCAA:

Branch’s assertion to the contrary, college presidents do not run the NCAA. It is run by athletic directors, coaches and conference commissioners, with a smattering of jock-crazed college presidents serving on NCAA committees who have done the bidding of the athletic programs and pass periodic reforms to help preserve a modicum of legitimacy for the system.

But I think Branch is right. The head of the NCAA is customarily a (former) college president; it used to be Myles Brand, and now it’s Mark Emmert. Surely Emmert’s successor will be Gordon Gee.

And there’s a whole lot more than just a smattering of jock-crazed presidents (and other highly ranked university administrators) on those committees.

And the NCAA can’t run without the greed and passivity of university presidents, so it absolutely must keep feeding those two things.

AND the NCAA needs college presidents to maintain the fiction that the organization has a shred of academic significance.

I’d say – along with Taylor Branch – that the power center of the NCAA is the university president and the university administration.

As Ellen Staurowsky says:

As commercial interests in college sport continue to grow, the fictions understandably become more difficult to sustain. The shame rests not with college sports per se but with higher education officials who have served as the architects and promoters of such a system.

… joke schools.

[University of New Mexico Police Department spokesman Lt. Robert] Haarhues said UNMPD’s biggest problem is intoxicated tailgaters leaving the parking lot without attending [football games].

“More people end up leaving than going inside to watch the game, and that can be a problem with driving,” he said. “We are trying to get more people to stay, but the fact that people are leaving probably has to do with the lack of success of the team. If they were better, maybe more people would watch.”

UNM: Just a bar.