How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life

The NCAA (allegedly) got rid of athletic dorms roughly 20 years ago after all the Oklahoma football criminal nonsense. Athletes are supposed to live with the regular students. Now, do they? That's a different story.

 

Most studies show that this is bunk - or that the so-called "Flutie Effect" on admissions and alumni giving is negligible.

Think Harvard and Yale are struggling to fund-raise these days? Think the University of Chicago is? Think MIT, which never played big-time sports to begin with as far as I know, is struggling to raise money?

 

I was watching "The Program" on AMC, and it's funny how people thought priorities were out of whack back almost 20 years ago, and how crazy it's gotten now.

The part that got to me is when the player is at the academic hearing, and the coach mutters how 80,000 people don't cheer for a chemistry test.

Absolutely true. Except I'd bet most of those 80,000 people will be grateful when the chemistry student finds a way to cure cancer, or better ways to treat a heart attack. Priorities.

 

That might be right. But if that's the case, Title IX should not apply to college sports. The logic of applying it to sports is that they are educational programs. If they aren't tax exempt, they're not part of the same universe of college programs that are educational — and thus subject to Title IX.

 

When I was in college, at a non-scholarship school, a friend of mine on the newspaper staff would always try to convince me not to go into sports writing. She wanted me to go news-side because, "Why would you want to report on scores for a living when there's so much else that's more important to write about?"

I always gave her some variation of that line from "The Program."

Now, today I think that sports journalism is a defensible path for me for a lot of reasons, although I probably wouldn't do it if I had it to do over again, but my answer at the time was really how I felt and it is embarrassing to me, looking back now. And I'm someone who, like I said, went to a small school.

 

I don't regret wanting to stay on the sports side of newspapering. I don't regret not wanting to stay away from the news side to this day.

 

I think I regret specializing so soon, period.

 

Harvard, Yale and other schools you mentioned are a different breed than your typical state school. Is there really a good way to know what say, Michigan, would be like if it didn't have a big-time football program (insert RichRod joke here) when it has had one for a century?

Another anecdotal item related to this. My parents went to a Division II school and one younger brothers went to an NAIA school. My parents hardly ever go back to their school and my brother hasn't been back since he graduated. They all spend time and money at Kansas, where my other brother and I went.

 

I went to Mizzou at the depth of the football program's existence. When I go back I am stunned at how different the stadium looks -- and also at how the rest of the campus looks and what an upgrade the facilities have gotten. (The J-school, for anyone who went there and hasn't been back lately, is well worth a one-day drop-in visit to see the upgrade from the Neff/Walter Williams Hall days.) And the academic reputation, specifically in the area of research, has been upgraded to the degree that bringing in Mizzou was considered a feather in the SEC's cap.

I have to believe the football team's growth has aided fund-raising tremendously in the last 20 years.

 

Don't you think it possible that Mizzou could have more efficiently bolstered their academic reputation? The athletic arms race is just a money suck. That can't be an efficient way to improve academic status.

Again: The vast majority of the research on the topic indicates that the connection between athletic success and fund-raising is tenuous at best. Certainly I imagine that it is inefficient.

There are some exceptions. George Mason is a big one.

 

I don't know if they could have. Possibly. But the skyboxes are full for big games, and I imagine the people who are invited into those skyboxes by the university president are more likely to write five-figure and six-figure checks.

It is one of the weirdest parts of our society, this worship of teenage athletes and the society that has built up around them.

 

Do you have links to any of these studies. I'm doubting you when you say that's what studies indicate, but I'm a little skeptical of the studies when, like LTL, my experience with schools and people I'm familiar with indicates otherwise.

Look at Kansas State. During the 80s its enrollment fell more than 12 percent to 17,500 in 1986. K-State was in danger of getting kicked out of the Big 8 and, if had kept going at that rate, today it would be smaller than Wichita State, Fort Hays State and perhaps some other D-II schools in state system.

Lon Kruger got the basketball program going in the late 80s and Bill Snyder worked the Manhattan Miracle in football. By 1990 there were more than 21,000 students. Enrollment was nearly 24,000 this fall.