I think the largest costs of intercollegiate sports programs—the facilities, contract staff, equipment, et cetera, are already baked in. Travel and maintenance costs would be lower in the 2020-2021 year, and colleges may not be getting expected revenues from concessions fees, ticket sales, et cetera (not sure if they would refund season ticket holders) but I think you’d have to do a lot of manipulation to extract usable information about the hypothetical savings from reducing or cancelling intercollegiate sport programs. But then, I think it is broadly acknowledged that these aren’t revenue generating programs and that their real utility is essentially advertising to alumni donors and prospective students. Whether they are actually effective for that purpose is another question to which I suspect an objective assessment would be no, or at least not consistently, but again there is a lot of financial forensics to tease out an authoritative answer, and even then there will be people arguing that they are worth it for ‘marquee status’ even at high cost.
Online learning is definitely cheaper; even aside from reduced maintenance and support staff, there is just the lack of liability of having actual students on campus where accidents, assaults, et cetera can result in lawsuits and settlements. But I think nearly everyone would agree that nobody is paying five figures a year to be on a few Zoom calls a week and email in their problem sets, then be proctored by a buggy test program. Post-secondary education is as much about being exposed to new ideas and different kinds of people as it is structured academics, and of course the hands on aspect (in STEAM education, certainly) of labs and physical projects is a key aspect in learning how to work on a team and with real hardware. Even if the quality of the academics was the same (I would argue that it was not) the experience was not good even for the best supported students, and online only education (or “AI-supported” that people are now advocating) is not a viable future for post-secondary (or indeed any level of) education.
Many students pick a school because they want to attend the games. They’ll pick a school with a big football program over one that doesn’t have football. So it’s not just the ticket sales and TV revenue that sports bring in. A school would lose out on tuition revenue if they didn’t have these big sport programs. And even if they don’t attend the games, sports can help with name recognition for the university. Schools which always do well in sports will be in the news, have stories on social media, and have more people talking about the school. Hearing the school’s name more can help influence a student’s decision to pick that university.
I can attest to the power of being true to one’s school. The other day I overheard a conversation that someone had with another choir member, sharing a story that he’d pay for his granddaughter to go to any Virginia college except the University of Virginia. (He’s a big Virginia Tech fan.)
I doubt he’d care if collegiate sports didn’t exist.
This is a specious argument. Most popular universities—and especially those with big football and/or basketball programs—boast about how low their acceptance rates are and aren’t going to be lacking for tuition revenue whether they attract sports-oriented students or not.
Further, once the entire college sports empire is banned, students won’t be choosing between school A with a sports program to watch on weekends versus school B that doesn’t have one. Nobody would have one.
How are other major pro sports handled? I know baseball has a real minor league, but what about hockey? Are athletes drafted right out of college to the pros? I think so. Soccer has development teams at lower-tier leagues, right? College baseball, hockey, and soccer are not in the national spotlight like football and basketball.
Other countries? Is college sports a thing like it is here?
I suspect eventually high school sports will start to be exploited the same as colleges once the barriers are broken down and money starts to flow. My son played HS football and they already had some deal with UnderArmor for gear because they are a successful program. Private high schools can recruit athletes, and there are already shenanigans getting top athletes into desirable programs to elevate their profile for the next step of college.
Pretty sure one of the Blackhawks’ latest star recruits was out of high school. ISTR pro soccer teams recruiting teens as well.
Watched the bowl game yesterday with a couple of serious fans. Both were concerned with some of the recent changes - the NIL payments, and the transfer portal. Thought it would increase the growing gap between the haves - basically the Big 10, the SEC, and Notre Dame - and everyone else. (Funny - I’d never heard of the transfer portal before yesterday. Seems like an odd concept to this disinterested observer.)
I’m pretty sure my college has a tech-incubator arm that sponsors/encourages startups. Strikes me as the sorta thing that could be done with sports - at least football/hoops. acknowledge a close symbiotic relationship between the 2 entities, but end the idea that they are part of the same “mission.” I guess I prefer to reduce hypocrisy when possible. Reduce the need to dumb down curricula, worry about admission standards, etc.
I could also see organizing conferences based on how much a school spends on those 2 sports. Let the top 30-40 big spenders compete against each other as a semi-pro league, while the smaller spenders can focus more on more regional rivalries, sports other than the big 2, intramural sports, and the like.
Like I said, I’d prefer that colleges emphasize their main mission as education and research. We’ve discussed before that no other country has anything really like America’s big money college sports.
Of course, I recognize that I am in the minority of Americans (and other nationalities re: futbol) in not really understanding folks’ rabidity for watching sport.
With a college affiliated with a hospital, the idea isn’t so much that the patients would be drawn from students of the school, but the doctors: Students at those medical schools would mostly be doing their internships/residencies at the hospital, and medical researchers working at the hospital would be affiliated with the school. The connection wouldn’t be relevant at all for anyone not majoring in a medical-related field.
Sort of. The American Hockey League is the highest-level minor hockey league in North America, and while it’s technically independent of the NHL, nearly all of its teams are affiliated with NHL teams, and it serves as a developmental league for the NHL.
But, my understanding is that, below that, there are various “junior hockey” leagues, most of which are amateur or semi-professional, and most of which are limited to players ages ~15-21.
It’s pretty common, at least for top young players from Canada and the U.S., that they get drafted directly out of high school/junior hockey by an NHL team (though many of them wind up spending time on a minor-league team for seasoning and development).
As noted, while college hockey is a thing in the U.S., and while some star NHL players did play in college, it’s not the primary route to the NHL for North American players.
I have watched many AHL games, and they are anything but “Bush League”.
The “production values” are certainly better than the AAA games I’ve watched.
Both of these have been group outings where our company wants to take a whole department and families to an event. At $30-40 a head it’s a lot more affordable to take 30-50 people to that than the MLB or NHL games.
AHL games seem to be similar in production value to high level college hockey games like BC, UMass, UNH, UMaine (but nowhere near the fan intensity) and the production values of AAA games are higher than big college baseball.
I’m really becoming a problem poster. Not sure how I did that. I was sure I was responding not only to your post but even quoting the bush league section.
Also, somewhat unique to hockey I believe, you can be drafted and still play in college. It is not unusual to watch the Frozen Four and see players that have already been drafted.
In fact it looks like my alma mater (Boston University) has over a dozen players on this year’s roster that have already been drafted by NHL teams.
But their superstar from last year (Macklin Celebrini) had not been drafted yet while played in college because he was so young - he was the #1 pick in the draft after finishing his freshman year and is now playing in the NHL.
I could absolutely see a system where college teams become more formal developmental leagues for the NHL and NBA by allowing players to play on those teams after they had already been drafted. In fact, that could be win-win as I could absolutely see myself watching a college team that had a star player that had been drafted by my favorite pro team. They would have to work out a payment system between the pro leagues and the colleges and some sort of insurance system, but it’s not impossible.
What you basically have now, at least for the NFL, is a system where college programs are developing players for free for NFL teams with the funding coming from donors and state governments (college coaches are almost universally the highest-paid public employee in the state). It’s kind of bonkers, but you can see why the NFL likes it…
The whole situation is a mess and the NCAA brought it all on. The insisted on enforcing policies that could not stand up in a court of law. After all, a university can pay an academic stipend to students in addition to tuition, books and health insurance. The athletes should be paid a fair wage. After all, it is a full time job.
A lot of the mess (not necessarily all) could have been prevented if the eligibility rules for football and basketball were the same as for baseball and hockey. Let the athlete be drafted by a pro team at any time and still retain collegiate eligibility. Some athletes don’t belong in college in an academic sense. Don’t force them to go that route. Those that actually want to get an education and know they are not ready to go pro can develop in a college program. In baseball and hockey those that don’t belong in college can go into the minor leagues or Junior A teams.
Is that true for baseball? I’m pretty sure once you are drafted you have to go to the professional leagues. That’s why sometimes drafted players refuse to sign a contract with the team that drafted them and then go to college for a year hoping to get a higher draft position or better signing bonus. The original drafting team gets nothing.
But I agree in general it makes way more sense for the college teams (at least at the highest level) to be a professional or semi-professional development league similar to minor league baseball or junior hockey in Canada.
ETA: Apparently NCAA is allowing players that have played in CHL (Canadian hockey) to retain college eligibility as well. But college hockey players aren’t paid, as far as I can tell, unlike top basketball and football players (NIL money).
Terminology here: once such a player signs with a professional team, they lose their college eligibility. Being drafted alone doesn’t cause them to lose that eligibility.
And, hence, why guys who get drafted coming out of high school, but don’t sign, can play college ball (and often get drafted again later).
As one of many examples: pitcher Jim Abbott was drafted by the Blue Jays, in the 36th round of the 1985 MLB amateur draft, at the conclusion of his high school career. He chose to not sign with them, instead enrolling at the University of Michigan, where he pitched for the Wolverines for three seasons (as well as pitching in the 1987 Pan American Games, and 1988 Summer Olympics). He was then drafted, again, in the 1988 MLB amateur draft, by the Angels, in the first round.
With the previous system you were pretty much stuck with the school you originally signed with. The transfer portal gives players a chance to switch to another school.
So if you were only recruited by weak schools that only play against other weak schools, and end up on one, but turn out to be an amazing talent, tough. You will never get to showcase your abilities because you’re surrounded by awful teammates and play against awful opponents, and come draft day you will be ignored by NFL teams unimpressed by someone from Upper Dakota College, and your school’s 3-9 record against other schools nobody pays attention to either. Even if those 3 wins were due to singular heroics where you managed to take over the games and win them on your own somehow.
The transfer portal gives those kids a chance to actually make a name for themselves.
Between that and NIL opportunities, college athletes are a bit less exploited by schools than they were for many decades, and even though there are downsides to both things, I think it has made things better for the kids giving everything all year for a chance to make a career out of the sport.
I’d still like it if football and basketball could be less tied into colleges as a developmental environment, and be more like baseball and hockey. And I’m in favor of your premise of “spinning them off”.