But wasn’t having a competitive football team supposed to make money?
Reading today’s news, I see that I erred with the title of this thread. It should have been $73 million (although not all of that is NCAA). And if the weakened football team means they can’t play in the same league for a few years, wouldn’t that cost still more money? The offsets, such as fewer scholarships, seem to me relatively tiny.
As for the answer to my original question, I now see that almost everyone’s answer, at Penn State, is – not me. There already have been a few quotes to this effect in the thread, and here’s a more obscure example:
The Penn State scandal is about dealing with criminal matters administratively. The NCAA fine, while no big moral problem, is another effort to try to uphold the reputation of football by dealing administratively with a crime.
Ideally, but it’s not really guaranteed to make money.
No, the fine is $60m, I’ve seen some weird phrasing in reports about the $13m from the Big Ten but it’s not actually a fine that PSU has to pay, but rather revenue they won’t receive. Typically in a college football athletic conference the conference gets all the money from bowl games and splits it amongst the conference. That’s something that 95% or more of college football fans are totally ignorant of. For example I believe the typical payout for a BCS Game–currently (at least for a little while longer) the biggest bowl games at the end of a season, is around $17m per team. However this money just goes into a pot that is split amongst the conference. I don’t know how it has come about that most fans don’t realize this, but being active on college football message boards I’m constantly seeing people cheering their school’s “upcoming $15m+ payday from a BCS bowl” when in fact that money gets split with the conference. The only real way the schools make significant money from bowls is if they sell enough tickets for the trip to be profitable. When you get a bowl berth the bowl gives you an allotment of tickets which you can resell for a profit, but you are obligated to pay the bowl for all tickets even if you can’t resell them.
Further, on field success is only marginally related to total revenue. Notre Dame has been bad quite a many years recently but they still sell out virtually every game, sell a ton of merchandise and have tons of money coming from big donors. Even during unsuccessful periods schools like Michigan, Ohio State, Florida, Alabama and Texas make a lot of money. I believe Texas is by far the most profitable college football program and they lost 5 games last year. Only time will tell if Penn State post-child rape scandal and post-Paterno has enough fan staying power to continue generating money despite being bad on the field.
There is some evidence PSU fans are pretty die hard, I think Joe Pa went 3-9 one year and they still had over 100,000 fans at every game.
At the end of the day it’s hard to really know how Penn State will move money around, they are going to be watched very closely by the media so they probably have a fairly large incentive to behave better than most college football teams typically behave.
The key question that doesn’t seem to have been asked is: what ordinarily happens to the profits generated by PSU’s football program?
The School Prez is saying the money won’t come from outside athletics, but that sounds misleading if normally the money flow goes the other way. To the extent that there’s less money going from athletics to other parts of the school (whereever that might be) then those other parts are where the money is effectively coming from.
[Not that this necessarily makes a difference in the justness of the punishment, of course.]
I don’t believe athletic profits often if ever go outside the Athletic Department, it isn’t typically the case that the athletic department kicks profits in to build a library. Supporters of college athletics will argue that sometimes big boosters will give money to have a library or something built, and what kept them interested in the school was the football team and thus that was indirectly responsible for the academic gift. But direct transfers from athletic department to academics is almost unheard of…primarily because almost all athletic departments are overall losing money or barely breaking even. I think I heard that under 20 athletic departments in the country actually generate a profit.
Now, lots of big time football programs generate a profit, but those profits are used to pay for basically every other sport (in some schools basketball will also operate at a profit.)
At Notre Dame (and I believe a handful of other schools), the athletic department money goes directly to the university’s administration, who determines how it will be spent. But it’s an anomoly.
I don’t have any actual knowledge here, but if I might be permitted to speculate, I would venture that this might depend on just how much money the football program is raking in. A lot of college football programs make money, but very few of them make as much money as PSU.
There’s only so much money you can spend on the rest of the athletic department, and I suspect that the few elite teams that are as popular as PSU are the ones whose profits goes beyond the Department.
If the men’s football team brings in $20 million per year, but the women’s lacrosse team loses $100k per year…why should the lacrosse team get a slice of that pie?
That’s just how it works. Sports that make money pay for the ones that dont. Take most olympic events… those competitors honed their skills in school for the mostpart. (at least in the US) Do you really think fencing, water polo, shot put, etc. could draw any revenue to keep themselves afloat? It’s kind of win/win here. As college teams can’t do things like buy player contracts with that money, so it’s gotta so somewhere.