It’s in the link I quoted. Those activity fees are the student fees mentioned in the article.
Right, but your cite indicates that those in the Big 10, SEC, Big 12 (power conferences) are the ones who actually make money. So like I said, for Texas A&M or Clemson to be charging student fees is silly. They are in big power conferences. The football TV deals alone are typically worth tens of millions for each school in the conference.
It says that only eight of those schools made money or broke even. Fewer than half of the power conference teams.
I’m still not discerning what larger point you’re trying to demonstrate (or even smaller one). Is it that a large majority of schools lose money on athletics and must charge students activities fees to make up for the losses? I guess we could debate college budgets and incorporate some other concepts into the discussion. Like, if all those other schools lose money on sports, what is their value to the schools in terms of marketing exposure? And what is the value therefore in splitting activities fees out from regular tuition?
Forgive me for wandering about. I’ve got a million thoughts on the business of college athletics, few of them complimentary towards the schools.
Successful sports teams also lead to more revenue for colleges because athletes give more as alumni and high profile sports success leads to more alumni giving, more applications, and better applicants.
What about the 98% of athletes who will never go pro?
Conference championship game, playoffs, and bowl game revenue is split between every team in both (if 2 are involved) conferences. The winning team gets the largest percentage followed by the losing team followed by an equal split between all the other schools in the conference. This arrangement was made in order to help the perennial “also ran” schools make up some of their shortfall on what can be very expensive sports programs. This is particularly true of football due to the large number of players and staff and the high cost of maintaining what is largely a single-use stadium If you have ever wondered why Notre Dame has fought so hard to maintain its independent status in football, it is largely because of the proceeds split rule. They don’t have to share their revenue with a conference. In the 'i80s and '90s they received about 4 mill for a win and about 2 mill for a loss. I am positive it is much much more now… Their opponents during those years might walk away with 500k for a win or 250k for a loss.
In addition, the marquee sports (football and basketball) foot most of the bills for secondary sports such as hockey, baseball, swimming, golf, etc. that don’t make the same kind of money in ticket sales, but that are desirable assets to a university in terms of smaller, but still important, advertising revenue and alumni donations.
As long as this financial support system continues, there is little to no incentive on the part of the universities or NCAA (who also gets their monetary cut) to do anything to fix what they don’t think is broken.
Activities fees charged to students produce revenue that is used to keep the gym lights on for intramural basketball games, to keep the pool open for recreational swimming, tennis courts open for recreational games, etc. and to pay referees wages for officiating intram Ural tournaments. These fees do NOT fund official sports programs.
a lot of professors dislike the sports but know you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. and you can’t even control the genie .
You forget that a large chunk of the basketball contract money goes back to the schools and conferences, and not just the ones that do well in the tournament (although that does play a part).
First of all, are you talking about the entire NCAA, or just “big time football and men’s basketball”? I don’t see anybody calling for Division III field hockey players to be paid.
As for paying players, there’s the obvious reason - Title IX. (And no, it’s not going away any time soon.) They might be able to get away with having, say, shoe companies license players’ rights and have them pay the players for that, but that’s only one step away from having schools turn into subsidiaries of the companies, the way NASCAR drivers belong to teams.
“Most players don’t have a major” - er, isn’t that because most players are freshmen and sophomores? There is an NCAA bylaw that says an athlete has to “designate a program studies leading toward a specific baccalaureate degree” by the start of their third year of enrollment, even if the athlete redshirted a year.
Of course, a one-and-done, or pretty much anyone else headed out the door, isn’t going to care how many years of postseason bans the school will receive because of any benefits he received, even if it pretty much wrecks the program. Remember when San Francisco was a basketball contender on a regular basis?
Yeah, it’s pretty much football and men’s basketball that are the problems. As for not having majors, how many declared majors are “general studies” or some such variant? Academic fraud among athletes has been a pretty big problem.
Sure, all school clubs and organizations get money from activities fees. For most clubs, it’s enough to buy pizza a few times a semester. Sports get… well, let’s just leave it as “more”.
And it’s not even the fees that I’m complaining about. It’s the rationale behind them. How can you with a straight face ask for fees as necessary to support the athletics programs, while in the same breath defending athletics programs for their profitability?
If they implement my plan, the schools would guarantee admission to the athletes - presumably after they had finished their playing days. The athletes could pay for school the same way non-athlete students do: academic scholarships, loans, money they saved from working. Maybe the teams pay the end-of-the-bench players with scholarships.
And I’m only talking about the big time programs. If you’re not in one of the big 5 conferences, you probably have legitimate student-athletes.
I’m not sure what your confusion is. Sports fans justify those fees by claiming that the sports programs produce revenue to more than offset that, when the truth is that those programs are a drain on the schools financial resources. You could argue that there is some non monetary value to the schools (I would disagree) but it just isn’t true that sports programs bring money to the schools. If sports really brought in enough donations and other revenue, there would be no need for those extra fees.
I think…we’re on the same side here.
I don’t really care if big time athletic programs are profitable at a school or not. I do care if a school continues to throw money into money-losing programs, including by docking students more in the form of fees, with the excuse that they need the programs, even if not profitable, as a form of marketing (but really because alumni demand high profile sports teams. Because those alumni are fucking assholes).
I’m mostly against the tail wagging the dog in large universities. The tail kinda being the programs but really more the big money donors and even average supporters who insist on winning teams at the cost of everything else. And all the while, they do the thing which gets my gristle more than anything else – which is insist that the athletes, who are still students with the same fucking rights as every other student, not be allowed to make money off their efforts. Note that I didn’t say that the schools must be required to pay them.
And if that upsets somebody’s notion of “competitive balance,” (which it won’t) then tough toenails to those people.
I think your ire is a little misplaced here. I guarantee you that “big money donors and even average supporters” would love to allow the student-athletes to make money. It’s the NCAA, which is ultimately run by administrators who want to keep the veneer of amateurism, which prevents them from doing so.
It’s advertising. Massive nationwide advertising for your school. National networks put on a program where your school’s name is mentioned 100x an hour, then they put on other programs before and after the main program where your school is mentioned over and over again as well.
Advertising costs money, but sports advertising costs about 1% what it would if you had to buy those mentions on the advertising market.
I don’t know about massive. I do know that major sports are among the most effective tools colleges have for building name/brand recognition. UCF’s applications increased by 11% this year thanks largely to our Undefeated National Championship ™ in 2017. Florida Gulf Coast University (which most people in Florida have never heard of) saw a huge spike in applications after a March Madness run.
Yeah, I probably overstated that some, though schools have tried to convince the courts in recent cases that boosters have told them they would be more likely to reduce donations if athletes were to be allowed to accept money (I’ll dig up the cite when I have more time, if needed. I’m already cheating my employer way too much today).
What would really happen is that donations would probably remain the same but the distribution would change, at the expense of coaches, administrators and lavish facilities. Very quickly, boosters’ donations would find their way to whichever part of the program resulted in the most wins. That might mean to the talent, it might mean to a talented coach like Saban or Bill Self. It would be really interesting to find out how that would shake down.
college sports breeds some real nutjob fans like this guy who is an Alabama fan who killed trees at Auburn. Don’t see as much of this stuff in pro fan groups
http://www.southernpigskin.com/archives/harvey-updyke-out-of-jail/
many of the nuttiest fans never set foot on any college campus except for FB games
What value is advertising if it doesn’t result in more revenue? That’s the whole point of the link I posted: Even with the big money donors, even with ticket sales, even with the national attention those programs are a net drain on the schools’ finances for all but fewer than a dozen schools.