UD‘s friend Dave Ridpath dreams the impossible dream by going to Colorado State University (site of some recent national sports news) and pointing out that building a new on-campus stadium when they already have an off-campus one is stupid.
Ridpath tonight is set to speak at a forum organized by opponents of an on-campus stadium. Skeptics argue CSU already has a perfectly decent facility in the 32,500-seat Hughes Stadium west of the city.
Ridpath said he was “dum[b]founded” when he heard CSU was considering building a new stadium. He said athletic success and student engagement aren’t linked directly to facilities, and he predicted that even if a new stadium is privately financed, costs for students will inevitably rise.
They’ll build it, of course; but Dave is in there trying.
As the enterprise collapses, photographers vie to see who can take the most compelling shot of a virtually empty stadium.
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Go here for the glorious history of Colorado State University’s brand new empty stadium.
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UD thanks John.
[Nicho] Garcia, 20, was identified through surveillance video more than a month after a 20-year-old man said he was punched repeatedly outside his apartment complex just west of campus by a man he asked to stop urinating next to him, according to a police report… Garcia admitted to being “really hammered” that night and said he often urinates outside when he’s drunk.
This blog has followed Colorado State’s inexorable march to a brand new unaffordable football stadium. Ominously, the only member of the board of trustees voting against the thing was its treasurer, “over concerns [about] the University’s increasing debt.” The rest of the crew said haha what the hell. Sure, it might fuck up the academic side of the school but since when does CSU have an academic side?
Idiotically optimistic revenue projections for the thing – projections cited by the trustees – came from the same firm that’s managing the project, which the chair of CSU economics department points out is a conflict of interest.
“ICON Group … is the one that produced the report saying that the stadium will pay for itself, and that is a conflict of interest,” [Steven] Shulman said.
He said if revenues are insufficient to pay debt payments for the new stadium, he believes the money will be taken out of the academic side of the University.
But anyway. No getting between a boy and his favorite sport.
The only real way to argue for an unnecessary, irrelevant, bankrupting, and bohemoth carbuncle right in the center of your campus is by way of recourse to the divine, and, in particular, to divine retribution. You need to scare people. If they don’t get going and get saved, there will be hell to pay. Without tithing hundreds of millions of dollars (many of them coming from students and taxpayers) toward a new football stadium, you will lose the battle with the devil (opposing teams).
There are of course many ways to argue against such a thing… And what Scathing Online Schoolmarm is going to do this morning is look at point/counterpoint, starting with the God Principle, and then moving on to a more secular stance.
Should Colorado State University build a new football stadium? (Note: There’s in fact no question about it. The stadium – at a school where vanishingly few students attend games despite a more than respectable winning average – will be built. So this post isn’t about urging people not to build the stadium. Although not officially announced, it’s a done deal. This is America.) SOS reviews the writing of Mark Knudson, an advocate, and Deborah Shulman, an opponent. Okay, first Knudson.
His title: PUT UP OR SHUT UP. [O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to rest!]
CSU athletic director Jack Graham had a vision — a shocking and inspiring vision — when he first took the gig, and he has done a magnificent job of describing that vision. We can now close our eyes (or look on our computer screens) and see the glistening new stadium, blending in as a centerpiece and invigorating the entire campus.
Like Jesus, AD Graham is a radical visionary whose glistening stadium on a hill we too can glimpse when we close our eyes. Also like Jesus, Coach McElwain is beginning to run out of patience with his wayward flock:
How much patience will McElwain be asked to have while he waits for something to actually get done on the vision?
And now the more fleshed out theology:
The issue isn’t whether or not the new stadium is needed. If you know anything about college athletics, you know how badly it is. You know it’s time for the tiny but vocal minority of under-educated opponents to punt.
If CSU wants to remain at all relevant in college sports — remember, there is at least some chance that college football and basketball players might start getting paid in the next few years — then this kind of upgrade is not only needed, it’s critical to simple survival.
If the stadium project doesn’t happen, then it’s just as likely CSU will end up in the lower level Big Sky Conference as it is they will never play in another New Mexico Bowl.
The small-thinking opponents of the stadium can keep talking about dressing up Hughes Stadium and trying to make it look big time, but it never will be. Talking about upgrades to Hughes Stadium is simply another way of saying “putting lipstick on a pig.” Nothing screams “Smallville” like a dirt parking lot — out in the middle of nowhere.
It is so abundantly obvious to sect adherents that a university with a low-attendance football stadium should pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a new one that no argument is needed. Either you see the vision or you don’t. But let me put it this way: Without this stadium, you will die (“survival”). After you die, you will be buried (“a dirt parking lot”) and then go to hell (“the lower level”).
Okay, counterpoint.
Headline: CSU Can’t Afford a New Football Stadium. Not at all catchy or scary. Nothing Sinners in the Hands of an Impatient God about it. SOS fears we are in for a sober, fact-based analysis.
She mentions “millions [in] deficit spending for football.” She reminds us that “faculty had been on a pay freeze for four years” back in 2012 when the AD spent millions and millions on ten football coaches.
More than half the athletic department revenue comes from student fees and university subsidy. The students, faculty and taxpayers pay for football.
In a nationwide trend and at CSU, attendance at football games has been declining. At CSU, athletic ticket sales are less than 8 percent of revenue. Profit or breaking even is an unrealistic goal since most Division 1 schools operate football programs at a considerable deficit and require university subsidy.
The $125 million stadium guesstimate doubled, yet the Board of Governors determined these donors need to raise just half the money, not including costs imposed on CSU and the city. City Councilman Wade Troxell estimated the stadium would impose up to $50 million in city infrastructure adaptations. Taxpayers will cover this cost.
Blah blah. Facts. It’s about vision, baby! Get out of Smallville! Think big!
Why have athletic donors been granted such power and leverage to dictate development of CSU and Fort Collins?
Cuz they got the vision!
… 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.
Yet another Pravda (this one The Coloradan) pumps out propaganda about a university’s athletic program. What a wonderful world it will be when the Colorado State University football team makes us an intellectually great, financially profitable institution! Comrade Jack (the article refers to the latest AD by his first name – ‘Under Jack’s Watch’ – because he is your friend, your buddy, one of you…) and his vast new $250 million stadium (that’s the cost estimate — we know how that goes) and plentiful new administrative assistants will make everything better. Although our attendance figures are pretty pathetic, he will make them perfect by increasing the number of available seats and raising ticket prices. He will bring a “new way of looking at college athletics,” in which athletics is the front porch of the university (you’ve never heard that one before!) and the AD spends the university’s money like a drunken sailor (also unprecedented!).
There was talk about how environmentally friendly the structure would be and how, included among the luxury suites and private boxes, would be recruiting areas, not just for athletic officials, but for department heads who wanted to impress upon potential faculty or students how great the university is.
Faculty recruitment at the proposed new Colorado State football stadium.
… about his university’s athletics program. This blog chronicles tons of econ profs – people capable of actually running the numbers – who turn against their employers and detail the lies the schools tell about the money they’re spending on football. The latest guy is Colorado State University’s Steven Shulman.
[Student fees] have risen 45 percent since Tony Frank was appointed president of CSU in 2008.
Institutional support to athletics has almost tripled since 2008. These subsidies transfer resources from academics into athletics. As a result, CSU has not been able to increase instructional spending per student or protect itself from revenue declines.
Every time the state cuts CSU’s budget, the university is forced to cut academic programs. Only athletics is insulated from budget cuts.
CSU’s way-expensive new stadium hosts losing games attended by fewer and fewer people.
A commenter on Shulman’s column puts the matter well.
CSU [has] gambled $450 million (in bond repayments) on a sport that is a dying a slow death. Empty seats, phony bowl games, ethics problems – everywhere you look there are reasons to question the new stadium decision. The project can only be justified and supported by a few old alumni counting on tax benefits.
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That “old alumni” thing has UD thinking about how we might retrofit football into a truly twenty-first century university curriculum.
Pretty much everyone agrees football is over – dying a slow death, as the commenter notes.
Figure it’s got another twenty years as a professional sport, ten years at the non-southern university, and thirty years at the southern. (Down south, they’ll have to wait until the fan melee that turns into a mass shooting to really finish off the game.) It’s not too soon to start thinking about how we can excite our ahistorical students (postmodern Americans are ignorant of history, and live in what one theorist calls a “radical presentness”) in things antiquarian by featuring football, alongside, say, the Salem Witch Trials, as examples of pre-Enlightenment American ways of life. We might not be able to get our students to study Latin, but we can certainly interest many of them in the study of football, which will feature, for instance, field trips to massive rotting campus colosseums.
Anyone who blogs about universities – ‘specially university athletics – has the very same task Samuel Beckett describes. How do you make room for – make sense of – the mess? For the theater of the absurd production that schools like New Mexico State (and let NMSU stand for myriad others like it) stage every single day? Go here for background on this clown school with its budget-killing big sports program and its vast empty stadium. Then go here for an update, as the state of New Mexico pulls funding from the school and lets the big thinkers on campus figure out how to keep their players rolling around in a huge vacant shell.
But that’s just one state school, from a notoriously anti-intellectual state. Consider the sporty devolution of the University of Minnesota, of all places, where they pay coaches millions of dollars to preside over endless sickening drug and sex scandals. People are now officially worried that the state legislature might be too grossed out to approve UMN’s funding requests. You’ve even got some restive citizens wondering about – wait for it – whether athletics might compromise a university’s mission. They seem particularly upset about coaches’ salaries.
But UMN to the rescue! They’re about to appoint this guy as one of their regents. Good optics.
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The Washington state senate shows you what can happen to a university’s autonomy when it keeps fucking up its athletic budget.
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At least we’ve got the very top of university football, with packed stadiums and plentiful revenues, to admire. Dave Zirin describes these lucky schools.
[Clemson’s] head coach in 1981, Danny Ford made $50,000 that year (adjusted for inflation, that would be $140,000 today). Dabo Swinney takes home a base salary of $4.55 million. He also made $1.4 million in bonuses for a total salary of just under $6 million. As for players, their lot in life is the same as in 1981, except now they receive a $388-a-month stipend.
[Clemson coach Dabo] Swinney was asked about the idea of actually paying players, given the dramatically transformed economic landscape of the game, and he said that if players are ever paid, “I’ll go do something else because there’s enough entitlement in this world as there is.” To call the desire to end this rank exploitation “entitlement” is Orwellian in the extreme. He might as well write “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” on the locker-room walls.
If anyone has expressed an obscene amount of entitlement, it’s Swinney. Here is someone working on a refurbished plantation who makes millions of dollars off the sweat and head injuries of overwhelmingly black, unpaid labor, and yet when asked about the Black Lives Matter movement in September, he said, ”Some of these people need to move to another country.”
… College football is a septic tank of entitlement. It’s a fungal culture created by the head coaches of Big Football. Dabo Swinney is the very embodiment of that culture: adrift, clueless, and filthy rich.
Yuck. Another fine mess.
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UD thanks John and Carl.
The latest econ professor to squawk about his or her university’s sports program – Colorado State’s Steven Shulman – reminds UD to mention that she thinks we’ll see, in a few years, at some schools, litmus tests for new hires in this field.
Are you an avid fan of football and basketball? Will you sign a pledge attesting to your intention to attend home games into perpetuity, your willingness to cancel class when a match-up will take place within 72 hours of a scheduled course session, your commitment to give C or higher grades to revenue athletes in your classes, and – most important – your promise never to subject the athletic program to economic analysis or talk to news outlets about your economic analysis of the program?
Econ professors are a seriously weak link in the American jock school chain. This blog has covered tons of economists who, with their specialized knowledge, subject their athletics departments to withering critique and then tell everyone about it. Here are some instances of professors, who, like Shulman (‘“Of course it sucks resources out of the academic side of the university,” Shulman said. “And it’s dishonest to deny that it does that… We are a land-grant university, and our mission is grounded in service to the citizens of Colorado. And to me what that means is keeping tuition low and affordable.”’), go after the game boys.
Remember Reed Olsen? Back in 2010 he told everyone at Missouri State University that their expensive new JQH stadium would not only not be profitable (the university insisted it would be profitable) but would hemorrhage money, and he caught hell for it. But of course he was right. As he explained in an email to UD at the time:
Let’s say that we are looking at a $2M ongoing loss in the arena. This is slightly more than 1% of the operating budget of the university. The university, because of a new state law, cannot raise in-state tuition more than [the] increase in the CPI. And for the last 2 years all universities in the state have agreed to not raise tuition at all in return for mostly stable state funding. So that means that most of this $2M must come out of cuts from other parts of the budget or the small increases in student fees from increased out of state tuition or other types of student fees. Students are assessed a fee for [the arena] which supposedly pays for free student seats at BB games. However, that revenue is included in the accounting, still leaving $2M left to pay. Faculty concern is that it comes out of our pocket.
If you’re Missouri State you definitely do not want people like Reed Olsen on your campus – people with the capacity to reason about the finances of your sports program. A simple interview questionnaire teasing out Olsen’s prejudice against sports programs would have saved MSU a lot of grief.
Then there’s Mark Killingsworth at Rutgers, a person just as persistent and tough-skinned as Olsen. Here’s a sample Killingsworth editorial. Excerpt:
The program is a financial disgrace. Since 2003-04, it has racked up $287 million in deficits. The university’s financial plan for sports calls for $183 million in additional deficits through 2022 — despite new revenue from the Big Ten Conference.
These deficits have been funded with subsidies from student fees (students have no say about that, of course) and university general funds. As even the university president concedes, athletics is “siphoning dollars from the academic mission.”
Then there’s Dick Barrett, once a University of Montana econ professor and now a state senator. He routinely offends UM regents by pointing out that their accounts of the athletic budget are full of shit.
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.
There’s UD‘s pal Bill Harbaugh, econ, University of Oregon, exploding the myth of the program’s self-sufficiency. Vanderbilt econ professor John Siegfried is amusing on the subject of his and other schools’ prisoner’s dilemma. There’s Marilyn Flowers, chair of economics at truly sports-fucked Ball State:
… Ball State has more than $14 million budgeted for its athletics programs. Approximately 80 percent of the budget is paid for from student fees – almost $9 million – and institutional support – almost $2.5 million.
“When it costs so much for kids to go to school, and you charge them $800 a year and most of them don’t go to any games, that I think is really unfortunate,” Flowers said.
Even Auburn hears occasional squawks from its econ department. The chair of economics there warns that sports is so autonomously powerful on campus that it represents “a second university.”
As jock schools escalate their policy of robbing students and taxpayers to give multimillionaire coaches raises and pay back crushing stadium debt, the last thing they need is financially literate people exposing their … complex… bookkeeping. The entry interview is their only opportunity to head these people off at the pass.
A local letter writer in Fort Collins Colorado rails against Colorado State University’s decision to build a new football stadium. Yet UD wonders whether moral revulsion will really be what brings the college game down.
People seem to like watching hulks hurt each other. The younger the better.
I think it’s more likely that a simple, irreversible shift in techno-preferences will do the trick. The whole “being there” thing just isn’t working for people anymore. Showing up isn’t in the cards; watching at home while fiddling with social media is the new deal. With social media you create your own big viewing party, down your own liquor, avoid driving in heavy traffic and negotiating foul drunks and sitting on hard bleachers (while gazing up at the assholes in the luxury boxes) and enduring long vast shrieking ads on Adzillatrons, etc., etc. Nothing can compete with the capacity to control your own environment.
See if you can squint hard enough – or open your eyes wide enough – to perceive a university as an institution having something to do – in a primary way – with education.
Then follow all the news we ever get out of Colorado State University. Follow the activity that has preoccupied its president pretty much to the exclusion of everything else from the moment he took the job. Follow the issue that preoccupies both the people on campus and the people in the surrounding city. It’s the new football stadium and whose lie about its funding gets to be released to the public.
[CSU’s just-fired Athletic Director] said he was upset when CSU’s vice president for advancement, Brett Anderson, told The Coloradoan last month that the school had raised [a pathetic] $24.2 million toward the stadium project. [A university spokesperson] said Tuesday the university stands behind that figure, based on national standards for counting donations.
That figure was first reported a day after [the AD] told a local business group that fundraising was going well for the stadium.
“It was at least twice that much,” [the AD] said of the money that had been raised at that point. He said another $15 million to $20 million was “imminent, in the funnel” that would have been finalized by October. That is the deadline set by [CSU’s president] and the CSU Board of Governors for raising at least half the estimated construction costs for the stadium plan to move forward when conditional approval was given in October 2012.
The 50 percent figure, [the AD] said, was quickly ruled too optimistic by [the university’s vp for advancement], who told administrators no university had ever raised that kind of money in private donations for a project like the stadium.
So, [the AD] said, university officials set a “private goal” of raising $75 million by October while still publicly stating the target was $110 million. That is half of what now is estimated as the $220 million “athletics portion” of the stadium that also will include and additional $34 million worth of academic space.
That was based on the premise the university could still finance $125 million, half of the original estimated cost, through revenue bonds. It also put the $30 million that Hughes Stadium needs in what [the president] said is “critical maintenance” toward a new stadium.
The “funding scenario suggested by [the AD] is factually inaccurate,” [a spokesperson] said, noting the Board of Governors’ goal for philanthropic fundraising for the stadium remains $110 million.
How… seemly. The leadership of a university squabbling about how they’re going to jigger – for public consumption – the actually hopeless numbers on football stadium payment. A “private” goal and a public goal?
Or how about we do some huckster bluster about the just about to be filled to bursting sales funnel?
Life of the mind, don’t you know.
Colorado State, one of America’s more markedly delusional, testosterone-run universities, has just said goodbye to its slightly too-delusional athletic director, Jack Graham.
To be sure, everyone in charge there – trustees, high-level administrators – appears to share the whacked-out, Blanche DuBois personality I’ve isolated so often on this blog when talking about schools like University of Nevada Las Vegas (panting to build a $900 million stadium) and Colorado State. Like Blanche, they have much less money than they need to live the grand life they fantasize for themselves; but – again like Blanche – this in no way stops them from traipsing around telling everyone that they’re rich and grand.
CSU, for instance, insisted its rich gentleman callers (to allude to a different Tennessee Williams play) would give it mucho millions toward the big ol’ football stadium it was gonna build. Indeed, just the other day the soon-to-be-erstwhile CSU AD – Graham, that is – announced to a gathering that fund-raising was going swell, swell! But then right after that
CSU’s vice president for advancement Brett Anderson told the Coloradoan a day later that only $24.2 million had been raised as of June 30…
Bummer! Blanche DuCSU sits around in her gauzy duds waiting for gentleman callers to cough up $110 million… She has always depended on the kindness of strangers… And then… the pathos of no one showing up…
On the other hand, Graham is a university coach, so his exit will be a little more secure than Blanche’s:
[CSU] still [has] to pay his annual $260,000 salary in monthly installments through November 2016…
For, you know, doing nothing… Standard operating procedure, and one of many reasons why big-time sports are such a boon to the American university…
But anyway. When the Lord closes a Blanche window, he always opens a new Blanche door.
Tyler Shannon, who represents the pro-stadium group Be Bold group on the advisory committee … says donors have committed quite a bit more money to the stadium than the $24.2 million that’s already in the bank.
It’s all still hush-hush, mind you! We can’t let the information out yet! But there’s a LOT more money where that came from, believe me!!
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Local commentary sees the same DuBois pathos in play:
Please. Fort Collins is an affluent community. Just say it like it is. [CSU’s president] finally figured out that CSU completely botched selling the community on the project, and anti-stadium proponents effectively derailed the project. [CSU’s president] finally became uncomfortable, which was not unreasonable. Making music with Graham wasn’t working, and [the president] decided to save [his] reputation and let Jack go because Jack wasn’t giving up his dream.
Presumably CSU’s president has been peeing himself over the idea that the now-gone AD (a multimillionaire) was another Phil Knight (a billionaire). That Graham would, uh, ride in like a Knight in shining armor? … to put the few extra cents needed for the stadium into the piggy bank… ?
Sad, sad. Butterfly net time.