… unusual.
Many are the adjectives used to describe big-time university sports. UD likes “unusual,” as used by Frank Deford:
We in the U.S. think, nostalgically, of athletics as integral to higher education, but perhaps they’re so unusual that they should be entirely separated from the academic and simply turned into an honest commercial adjunct.
In making this increasingly popular proposal, Deford chooses (from dozens and dozens of examples) to talk about the University of North Carolina at Wilmington:
The University of North Carolina, Wilmington provides a typical recent case. The Seahawks field teams in 19 Division One sports, but unfortunately, like many colleges, UNCW athletics are in the red, so the chancellor, Gary L. Miller, assembled a committee, which recommended the elimination of five sports: men’s and women’s swimming, men’s cross country and indoor track and softball.
Well, that produced a firestorm, especially with swimming, which has won the conference 12 years in a row and, which, financially, is about on budget. Now, by contrast, the basketball team has a deficit of a million dollars; the coach himself earns almost a half million a season, notwithstanding that the team lost two-thirds of its games and is academically on probation.
UD is aware that the only problem in this scenario, from the point of view of millions of Americans, is that the coach only makes half a million. But Deford is arguing that he could make ever so much more than most of us could even imagine if we freed him from the pointless restraints of universities.
“Let alumni and local businesses pay for sports,” says Deford. Do that, and the sky’s the limit.
June 26th, 2013 at 4:24PM
I thought of you while listening to Deford this morning. I don’t have much hope, but I’d love his words to have some effect.