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Monday, December 04, 2006

A Charitable Organization


'With Sunday night's televised announcement of the BCS pairings, and the onset two weeks hence of the bowl season, college football's rich will get richer even as the NCAA's argument for keeping its tax-exempt status will get poorer. A staggering amount of money is about to be thrown around -- total payouts in excess of $100 million in the BCS events alone, $85 million of that coming from Fox TV -- just weeks after NCAA president Myles Brand's letter to Congress said, essentially, that his is a charitable organization.

Though the nation's top-ranked team, Ohio State, will be required to share its $14 million-to-$17 million bowl payday with its conference members, that school's football operation already is working with a $22.2-million surplus for fiscal 2004-05. And Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist said he is confident that money will remain in the Ohio State athletic department -- likely all in football.

"The NCAA, in effect, is a trade association for coaches and athletic directors," said Zimbalist, one of the nation's premier sports economists whose most recent book is "The Bottom Line: Observations and Arguments on the Sports Business." "It's true that just a handful of schools have a surplus, and the successful football programs that do generate a surplus, since there are no stockholders involved, find a way to spend it by adding to their tutoring budget or adding a new wing to their workout facility or putting in a bonus for this person or that."

There are occasions when some football funds find their way into supporting other athletic programs, Zimbalist said, but even those bucks stop far short of the library or sociology department. And on the more common occasions when football programs lose money, athletic departments typically rein in budgets for other sports rather than trimming football.

Rutgers, for instance, is facing university-wide cuts and is eliminating six so-called non-revenue sports -- such as tennis, swimming, crew and fencing -- so that the suddenly bowl-bound football team, which is operating in the red, can maintain its current spending ($13.2 million in 2004-05).

"I don't think anybody in his right mind," Zimbalist said, "would say this does anything to fulfill the educational purpose."

The NCAA acknowledges that athletic budgets at Division I schools have increased at a rate roughly three times that of university budgets during the last decade. Brand pointed to market forces, insisting that if a similar appetite existed for telecasting "French lectures and accounting classes" as for football and basketball, "transforming those academic offerings into commercialized events would not undermine the educational purpose for which the offerings are made.

"The scale of their popularity and the revenues they generate do not diminish the importance of their educational value," he wrote to the House Ways and Means Committee. "The lessons learned on the football field or men's basketball court are no less in value or importance to those student-athletes than the ones learned on the hockey rink or softball diamond -- nor, for that matter, than those learned in theater, dance, music, journalism or other non-classroom environments."

Zimbalist's response is that Brand is "either ignorant or putting a vast spin on reality. First of all, the typical football player doesn't spend 20 hours on his sport a week, but more like 40 or 50 ... Obviously, there might be a week when a violinist might put in 40 hours for a college performance, but the norm is much different.

"And the culture of athletics at these schools is a philistine culture. It's not an intellectual culture. College isn't about generic skills; you can develop social and physical skills outside of college. There's something special about college that has to do with intellectual development. Brand used to be a philosophy professor; he ought to know this stuff."

Welch Suggs, associate director of the NCAA watchdog Knight Commission, agreed that "it's tough to see this is an educational enterprise and not a business. We've always believed that college sports has a place in higher education. It's clear, though, that the missions of athletic departments have deviated, which is why we try to lessen that deviation through the reports we put out."

A veteran NCAA official, requesting anonymity, said he was surprised that Congress "hasn't raised the tax-exempt thing before now. As coaches salaries have gone up, that alone tends to separate the endeavor from higher education. Does Coach X deserve $3 million a year? Is it a business or is it education?

"We've always said it's education, and we look at the benefits for a university as a whole, how donations go up [with successful high-visibility teams]. Also, hundreds of kids are getting scholarships, and things like skyboxes are a way to raise money to do that."

To Zimbalist, though, "the real issues have to do with the impact these big-time sports have on the educational process and whether or not the football and basketball players are actually students ... Because if these kids were properly prepared for college, and we wanted them to go to college, we could put our resources into academic scholarships. A large share of football players don't belong in college; they can't hold up, given the academic training they have."

Meanwhile, there is little sense that Congress is about to take on the NCAA's jockocracy. A decade ago, Arkansas athletic director Frank Broyles, hearing similar rumblings, was convinced he could quiet them by "calling the president." He didn't mean of the university. He meant Bill Clinton.

"I just think," Suggs said, "college sports has a lot of friends in Congress."'