The University of Iowa is an avatar here.
How can it be running an almost three million dollar athletics deficit and at the same time have a stupendous winning record?
This was the year the Hawkeye football team went 12-0 in the regular season, won the Big Ten’s West Division and played in the Rose Bowl. So why did the athletics department end the year in the red?
I’ll tell you why. Because fewer and fewer – vanishingly fewer – people want to go to the games. Ticket revenue is drastically down. And this is the effing heartland, where everyone has a sacred obligation to piss themselves with excitement on game day.
The second element of the financial collapse is quite comical, quite in keeping with the florid absurdities of simulacral culture.
But although ticket sales were low, the undefeated season triggered performance bonuses for coaches.
Head football coach Kirk Ferentz, for example, picked up an extra $1 million in 2015 for milestones that included going undefeated, finishing ranked in the top 10, going to a New Year’s Day bowl game, being named coach of the year and having a team graduation rate of at least 70 percent.
UI coaching salaries, bonuses and benefits totaled $20.3 million for fiscal 2016, up from $18.2 million the previous year, reports shows.
The whole beautiful shows churns along, runs itself, rewards itself, with little input or involvement from any actual audience – and certainly little involvement from – uh – university students. The location of Kirk Ferentz’s milestones and rewards, randomly enough, does happen to be a university, but the university isn’t showing up for his big days. It only pays his bills.
You don’t get more simulacral than that.
Congrats Iowa. You’re the wave of the future.
February 22nd, 2017 at 9:36AM
don’t forget our millions in budget cuts to the university this year (reportedly more in the works in the legislature) and the dismantling of our unions, all while the stadium gets a 90million dollar “upgrade” to a grandstand.
http://www.press-citizen.com/story/news/education/college/2017/02/16/university-of-iowa-collective-bargaining-changes-could-weaken-literary-reputation/98010146/
February 22nd, 2017 at 10:40AM
dmf: oh yes – there’s much more.
February 22nd, 2017 at 3:33PM
good thing we have a few precariatized grad students to at least raise the flag of resistance, so far from the faculty bupkis, someone should study how beatdown the faculty are in these redstate sports-life-support universities, maybe they’ve been injected with some kind of parasite venom like roaches zombied by wasps.
http://www.kcci.com/article/new-bill-would-allow-guns-on-campus-at-iowa-s-public-universities/8958475
February 22nd, 2017 at 8:59PM
Well I guess they had an “undefeated season” if you ignore losing to Michigan State in the Big 12 championship and getting waxed in the Rose Bowl by Stanford (it was 35-0 at halftime– ouch!). But what’s a mild omission among friends?
And no dmf, I don’t believe this fiscal insanity is limited to “redstate sports-life-support universities”. UMass? UConn? Rutgers anyone? It’s pretty damn universal.
February 22nd, 2017 at 9:01PM
correction “Big 10” championship. woops. Here’s trivia: the Big 10 football conference has 12 teams and the Big 12 has ten.
February 23rd, 2017 at 7:32AM
dmf, thanks. In Ohio, the budget-cutting is real. So is the selectivity of the cutting. There’s room for pet projects, unexplained and extraordinary pay raises, crony hiring, etc.
There’re at least two management types I know, one personally and one through his writing, who got conned by senior managements into approving or going along with harsh austerity measures. They were thinking of something like shared sacrifice. Turned out it was austerity for the low-end folks only.
February 23rd, 2017 at 10:40AM
MikeM, not sure what yer responding to, my point was about the sheepishness of faculty in the face of these threats to their livelihoods (and as health-insurance goes lives).
http://www.press-citizen.com/story/news/education/college/2017/02/21/iowa-regents-propose-reducing-contracts-university-unions-salaries-alone/98176094/
February 24th, 2017 at 7:09AM
dmf, Ohio Governor Kasich’s anti-teacher union, anti-professor union animus is so “out there” even conservative Republican types are revolted. Our Podunk Tech’s president noted publicly that only one-third of those who enter Podunk actually graduate. Word of warning, all that.
I’m not a professor, but I sure as hell know when a line of work is getting stiffed.