What Role Do College Sports Play at Their Institutions?
Written by James Brown, Gatorsfirst.com Co-Founder
I am always fascinated by articles on college sports finances and regulations, particularly what happens to "lucrative" bowl payouts (did you know Florida lost money on winning the BCS title last year—at least before increased donations and merchandise sales?...but it got a smaller portion of the payout than they spent in sending a team of football players to Arizona for the festivities).
My brother is a sport management major at the University of Florida, so I pretty much bring up any crazy idea about the business side of sports to him. I also frequently ask him exactly what Title IX is, stuff like that.
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Recently, I found a link from Bill Simmons concerning a "roundtable discussion" of the place of sport at Holy Cross (Simmons is an alum, as he frequently mentions in his column). I'd usually bug my bro with this kind of thing on AIM while he's not paying attention in class (and I'm, uh, taking it easy at work), but he wasn't online this time. I thought it could be an interesting conversation starter to include my e-mail and his reply below.
By no means was this an exhausting intellectual exercise, but I hope including others in our somewhat regular conversations will serve to enlighten the public as to what common misconceptions there are about the NCAA and sports business in general, and also allow all of us to have a greater understanding of why certain things about the sports we love are the way they are.
Here's the link that spurred this discussion:
I'll also note that I didn't originally intend for this to be published, so the discussion is a little rough and I got some facts wrong in trying to give my bro some background when I e-mailed him.
I also was pretty angry at the attitudes of some of the people in the article, so it's probably somewhat slanted against the school, but hey it's my opinion. I've taken some liberties editing the original e-mails, but tried to keep the message.
Please refer to the Wikipedia article linked below for the real facts about a college I wouldn't know existed if it wasn't for Bill Simmons...
Me:
"A lot of the people in this thing made me angry on different levels, but I thought it was important to see what different people think about sports at colleges, even though I don't agree with all of it. I also think they probably had misconceptions.
College of the Holy Cross is somewhere up by Boston I think, Bill Simmons ESPN writer went there, they used to be fairly prominent in Division 1, even won National Titles in Men's Basketball and stuff.[GOOSE NOTES: I since looked up Wikipedia and found out they won one NCAA basketball championship, and one College World Series- the only team from the Northeast to ever win the CWS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_of_the_holy_cross#Athletics]
"
Now they are just another snobby private school that is stuck between trying to appease older alumni who'd like a return to athletic prominence (and for the school to issue football scholarships) and newer alumni/current students who (I'd say obviously) don't care as much about the athletic tradition (If they did, I'd argue, they'd have gone to BC or somewhere else). Old Celtic greats like Bob Cousy went there. Now they just complain about the same old mid-major stuff (no one will play us because we're too good) for basketball, and are stuck between not caring and caring. I'm not sure if this is something you guys talk about in class, and I don't really know the answer, though I'm inclined to say they are being dumb and could benefit by stepping up the athletics- at least for the national exposure beyond being a 13 seed in someone's NCAA bracket.
My Brother:
"Sounds like they are doing everything possible to still act like they are all about academics and do not want to compromise anything for athletics.
In this way they are already benefiting from having articles like this to say &we're better than you because we care about academics. I guess its all really a prestige thing. Long story short, there really is no answer, it depends on what they are really looking for. Some of the things they were saying about equal scholarships for men's and women's is not completely accurate, unless that is a personal goal of the school to uphold all 3 prongs of the title IX test (that would be direct proportionality, the other 2 are history of improvement and upholding the needs and desires of the underrepresented sex). I'm a big supporter of buffing up your athletics to gain exposure, the whole reason anybody knows that Xavier is a school. By the way success in sports DOES relate to more donations from alumni, I don't know what they were basing that statement on, but they are full of [uh, Jim Tressel's Sweater Vest collection].
All the figures i saw in the NCAA class and sport administration class i took showed a correlation between success and donations. Some of the ways donations are recorded are kind of messed up in universities, and the athletics program isn't credited for a large sum of the money that they bring in because the donations are not recorded as being related to athletics. The arguments they made seemed pretty standard for the whole athletics v. academics argument. The whole thing about athletes changing their schedule for practice was dumb. I know a lot of people that plan their school schedule around a work schedule, or other things not related to academics at all. Like in Gainesville if you serve at most restaurants you have to have a daytime shift during the week, which causes you to take at least one day off a week of school. Anyway, I would say athletics is not something that they want to gain exposure from, and almost benefit from being able to complain about it.
"
In case you're curious about some of the other topics mentioned in this article, good starting points include:
Any thoughts?
You can view the original article here.
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