… IMG, the world’s largest sports marketing company, has recently acquired Host Communications, International Sports Properties and The Collegiate Licensing Corporation in order the create the most powerful and integrated collegiate sports marketing company in the industry. Colleges can’t generate this revenue from within. They need to partner with, outsource to or accept guarantees from entities like IMG and ESPN in order to maximize revenues. What determines the value of these deals? The answer, plain and simple, is winning. Thus, the immense pressure on athletic directors and head coaches to win conference championships and get to bowl games. When the pressure is this intense, the money this great and the scrutiny this acute, we should expect to see the best and the worst in people …
This is from a rather strange piece in Forbes about the commercialization of university football, and the shocking (to the writer, at least) academic and financial scandal now raging in the North Carolina Chapel Hill sports program. The writer correctly describes, here, the incredible distortions and corruptions attendant on having to win big if you’re going to justify the expense of your program, and maybe even make a profit (almost no universities do). But he describes the functioning of big time athletics programs incorrectly throughout the piece.
He argues, for instance, that all programs go to great lengths to hold down costs.
You need only revisit the recent private plane scandal at the University of Kansas, or consider how universities compensate coaches these days, to shoot that one down. How many schools have bought totally unnecessary, insanely expensive Adzillatrons for their stadiums? How many schools spend millions and millions of dollars every year in litigation with coaches and players any idiot could have seen were going to be trouble?
No – see – it’s like this. Bunch of cowboys ridin’ the bomb.
August 30th, 2010 at 2:30PM
It’s like the college sports programs are in an “arms war.”