How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life

Indeed. And it only gets weirder as you peel back the layers.

The love of college sports has led to interest in recruiting. An obsessive interest in recruiting.

That interest has led to the coverage of recruiting becoming a profession in and of itself.

That leads to sites like ESPNHoopgurlz, with rankings of the top 100 girls' basketball players in the country -- right down to the Class of 2015.

And three of the top 40 players in the Class of 2015 -- high school freshmen, mind you -- have committed to major colleges.

We went over the line somewhere along that paper trail. At what point we went over the line is open to conjecture.

 

Only thing I can add to this is a quote I got from the chair of the board of an ACC college over the Christmas break.
"No one ever stops me on the street and says what are you going to do about that math department."

His wife shared this anecdote. After they lost their rivalry game, he put his phone on vibrate and placed it on the dining room table. "Sweatrto God that thing rolled its way off the table in about five minutes."

 

The big one is "Challenging the Myth" by Robert H. Frank at Cornell. You can Google it - it comes up as a PDF, so I'm not sure how to link it.

Frank cites to a bunch of studies, and each, of course, focuses on slightly different effects. As far as alumni giving goes, the studies seem to indicate that athletic success triggers donations to the athletic department, but not to the university proper.

They also note that any positive expected effect from athletic success is countered by the non-negligible risk of NCAA sanctions or probation in the future, which then serves as a drag on alumni giving.

 

http://www.readthehook.com/files/old/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/2004_kcia_frank_report.pdf.

 

So the answer to that technological conundrum was: Just link it.

Easy enough.

 

Some context would be nice.

Ohio State spent $95 million on athletics in 2009.

This was out of a total university expenditure of $4.37 billion.

So this massive athletics expenditure is roughly 4 percent of the overall university budget and far less than the 1.48 billion spent on "Instruction and General", which I take to mean "teaching". And that teaching number doesn't include $506 million for "separately budgeted research". or the $1.9 billion to run the university hospitals.

The university took in 4.45 billion that year and athletics contributed to $307 million in auxiliary income.

Numbers are here: http://www.osu.edu/osutoday/stuinfo09.php

Took about 10 seconds to find this on The Google.

 

What percentage does the physics department get? What percentage does the English department get?

Your call for context is well-noted, and even needed here.

But context depends on how you want to frame it. Are we comparing the athletic departments against academics as a monolithic entity? Or are we supposed to break it down further, i.e. athletic budget vs. law school budget or athletic department vs. AIDS research budget? And on and on ...

I don't know the answer. I'm just raising the question. There's a lot of ways to come at it.

 

Thanks. I've read a good chunk of it, but haven't gotten through the whole thing yet. My take away from it is that we're not quite arguing the same things.

He's laying it out that spending whatever it takes to win, and then actually winning, doesn't pay off. My belief is that giving your students and alumni a team that could win in theory adds to your campus environment and keeps people interested in and invested in your school even after they graduate, if that makes sense.

Ole Miss gets roughly the same benefit of having an SEC sports program as Alabama, even if it doesn't win a title. It still gets rich alumni on campus, in luxury boxes getting liquored up and pulling out the check book. They might write a check for $1 million for the weight room and $100,000 for the library, but they might not be doing either if they graduated from Jackson State and had no interest in going back to the school years later.

That's a quote from the report I didn't agree with. It can inhibit, but doesn't always. Sometimes donors over compensate for athletic failure by overpaying.

 

For some schools, big-time athletics is a boon. For others, it drains from academics. Avoiding generalizations is always good.

(Yes, I did that on purpose.)

 

I think that is true that success stimulates alumni giving and failure inhibits it. That's why you see so many coaches getting shitcanned or, like Mark Richt, being on the hot seat every year because pretty good isn't enough.

This would be another reason the number of bowls won't be reduced. Every school can claim a "success" and leverage it for more donations.

 

For those who know, how was UConn doing in enrollment and giving before hoops got cranked up and football went D-I?

 

Funny thing, there are more than a few small schools that have added sports programs and teams (including football) as a way to compete for male students who are picking colleges.
That said, I think it is ridiculous seeing the amount spent by some schools on their programs. I'm pretty sure they have to invent ways to spend money they have. Boosters would be better off donating to an "off-campus" organization that funnels money to recruits and their families instead of some unnecessary cosmetic feature.