My basic thought is that the link between big money college sports - primarily men’s foot and basketball - and their traditional role as amateur competitions involving student athletes is becoming more and more tenuous. With big money television contracts, underclassmen going pro, seemingly increased transfers and extended eligibility, huge coaching salaries, and now paid athletes, I’m wondering if the entire model ought to be rethought, and the big money sports be “spun off” from the colleges.
Today I’m going over to my sister’s, as her husband wanted to host a party for my alma mater (Illinois) in a bowl game. I watch essentially no pro or college sports, and long ago concluded that Illinois would always find a way to lose the big game. I don’t really understand why our society seems so interested in college and pro sports, but it does not impress me as really integral with what I believe should be a core function of (especially public) colleges. If the sports truly generated excess revenue which was turned over towards education, that would be a different matter. But my understanding is that only a small minority of the biggest football and hoops programs actually generate excess revenues.
So I would propose that college football and basketball be spun off into a minor league system - partially funded by the pro leagues. If a college wanted to somehow be related to a particular team - maybe sell its name to the team, that would be all right. But let’s stop the facade that these competititors are “student athletes.”
(I was surprised to read a newspaper article saying star players in both teams in the game I will be watching today, will sit out the game, because of upcoming NFL tryout and transfer considerations.)
A short search turned up this thread, but nothing more recent. I posted this in GD rather than The Game Room, thinking some folk who never visit that forum - or, like me, who are not sports fans - might participate.
While this idea has merit, I don’t see it happening for a few reasons.
Colleges and universities want high-profile successful sports programs because they often are a stimulus to admissions and stimulate big donations from sports-obsessed alumni and other boosters.
Players might benefit from not having to worry about academics in an expanded minor league format (not that they pay all that much attention to studies now). But would the upper-tier athletes make as much money in the minor leagues as they now do from NIL payments at the big schools?
Save for the funding that’s what it is now. And they are student athletes, not like the old days and what Alex Karras called a ‘scholarship’, meaning he was given money for room and board plus tuition which was the only academic requirement. The funding requirements are actually quite low since the students are unpaid and the funding goes to pay for their coaches and huge stadiums and not even to cover the athlete’s medical expenses.
What I read this morning suggested such benefits are difficult to quantify, and much of such donations go to the athletic programs, rather than the schools’ other endeavors.
Yeah, I’ll have to look into current expectations of athletes. My memory is from being a PolSci TA in the early 80s, at which time a good many UofI football and basketball players were nearly illiterate and often did not bother attending classes.
I’m not quite sure I understand this. Would you please elaborate? What little research I did seems to indicate that the biggest sports colleges spent quite a bit on their programs. I believe Alabama football was way out front. Not sure how much it matters whether the $ goes to a coach, a stadium, or into an athlete’s pocket.
Five universities – Louisiana State University, University of Arkansas, University of Oklahoma, University of Mississippi, and University of Texas – all had annual per student-athlete expenditures exceeding $300,000 (with an average of about $326,441) compared to their annual per FTE student average expenditure of approximately $45,554 in 2021-2022.
Some of the biggest donors to universities are sports-oriented but have also given big money to non-sports programs. Examples cited in the linked article are Les Wexner, an O.S.U. sports booster who gave $$$ to the O.S.U. Medical Center, and Jimmy Haslam. Whether they’d fork over as much dough to these schools in the absence of basketball and football programs is questionable.
This was just one of the few articles I read this morning claiming that athletic expenditures exceed revenues at most colleges. It also states:
As well as:
Also read that the current Bears QB earned millions of $ while in college from his name/image licensing.
I’m just wondering if a new model might be appropriate for big money college sports given recent changes in the economics. I guess I have an outdated perception of education and research being the primary functions of higher education, combined with my personal preference against hypocrisy as well as my personal disinterest in watching sports. I could imagine increasing the apparent independence of sports programs. Make the college and the temas separate but related entities. Maybe free the students of the need to attend classes - while possibly allowing them the opportunity to do so if they wish.
I do think that college sports – mostly, as you note, big-time football and basketball programs – are in the midst of massive change, due to not only NIL (name, image, likeness) payments to athletes (which was not even a thing until four years ago), but also the “transfer portal,” another new wrinkle, which has made it far easier for student-athletes to move from one school to another. The combination of the two has given the athletes far more power than they used to have.
The sense I have is that a lot of coaches and administrators (and fans) aren’t thrilled with how things have changed, and the programs are still navigating how best to operate a successful team now.
My suspicion is that things are going to continue to rapidly evolve on their own anyway, and until that dust settles, it’s hard to know exactly what a good solution will be.
Sports are a ‘marquee issue’ for major universities, and their administration is clearly willing to spend massive amounts of money to retain those programs even if the evidence that they actually serve to inspire donations (outside of sports facilities) or improve admissions (in a time when most major universities are boasting about how ‘exclusive’ their admissions policies are) is lacking or negative. I frankly don’t see that changing without a major shakeup of the post-secondary educational system because I don’t know what people would do without their bowl/championship games or ‘alumni pride’.
However, I suspect that college football is going to experience some of the blowback already coming at the NFL for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), especially because the players are so young, and it will likely become enough of a liability to impose rules to limit hard contact. I can’t see college basketball ever going away because it is too much of a moneymaker and basically the only feeder route into the NBA, and the professional league has shown no interest in setting up a minor league-style system.
I was wondering if college sport might be treated similarly to college hospitals. Here in the Chicago area we have major hospitals - such as Loyola and Northwestern - which are at a distance from those schools’ main campuses. I’m not sure whether alumni of those schools choose their hospitals based on having attended school there. I don’t know whether those hospitals get donations from alumni more than other sources.
Just seems like a little more of an “arm’s distance” relationship, which could be applied to college sports.
(Full disclaimer: some of my thinking stems from recent thoughts/discussions I have had concerning “non-profit” organizations. While non-profits do not have to distribute their profits to shareholders, they certainly have no compunction against maximizing revenues. And there is zero expectation that they spend those revenues in any charitable manner.)
I don’t philosophically disagree with your premise but I think there are negative incentives for universities (major ones, anyway) to morph into that kind of a relationship with high ranking sports teams, and even colleges that have lower tier competitive sports still spend an inordinate amount of money on maintaining facilities for their sport activities. Unless it becomes financially prohibitive I don’t see that changing. It is one of the many ways that the United States is ‘exceptional’, and not in a particularly favorable or logical way.
Yeah, in the public mind ‘non-profit’ is synonymous with ‘charity’ even though most non-profit corporations are the furtherest thing from being charitable. The distinction is largely one of tax status and the ability to attract outside financing.
The University of Phoenix is a for-profit, almost entirely online school, which has (like many of its for-profit online competitors) faced ongoing criticism for various issues, including student loan fraud and deceptive practices, and is generally poorly-rated for its academics and graduation rate.
I strongly suspect that University of Phoenix bought the naming rights to the Cardinals’ stadium in an effort to generate additional name recognition, and give themselves a veneer of respectability among potential students. (And, FWIW, the University of Phoenix does not have its own sports teams. )
Wagstaff: Where would this college be without football? Have we got a stadium? The Professors: Yes. Wagstaff: Have we got a college? The Professors: Yes. Wagstaff: Well, we can’t support both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college. The Professors: But Professor, where will the students sleep? Wagstaff: Where they always sleep. In the classroom.
They would charge their clients for the privilege of playing videogames.
@kenobi_65 was too generous in his description of University of Phoenix; it is almost a complete scam. It does technically have accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission but the US Department of Education OIG found that the HLC’s oversight of for-profit universities was deficient. In general, for-profit universities provide pretty worthless credentials and do little vetting of their students other than assuring that they can be eligible for student loans regardless of whether the prospective students have adequate preparation or academic history indicating a good probability of success in completing their program or obtaining a salary enabling them to pay back the loans, and they tend to be very high cost for the questionable quality of instruction in compared to low-cost community colleges.
I myself tried an online school 20 years ago and it was crap.
IIRC it claimed some kind of accreditation at the time but that was surely a lie. The courses I signed up for didn’t have content that matched what they said they did and I withdrew pretty quickly. I was lucky I at least got a refund for most of what I paid but every dollar was wasted.
This is probably off-topic though, since we’re supposed to be discussing real schools, especially ones with sports programs, and as far as I know none of the online universities have sports teams.
I do think it raises the question of how much it costs a college for students that do remote learning, as they did heavily early on in the pandemic. And for that matter, a lot of sports was suspended or canceled around that time. I wonder if there is any merit in looking at how all of that affected school revenues and if you could extrapolate any insight into what would happen if you took sports out of colleges.
On the other hand, everything was so weird then, that data might not be helpful.
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