And if the two highest paid public servants in your state are the University football coach and the State football coach, what sort of government is it?
On the other hand if most of your school’s money is in some investment firm, instead of invested in the wellbeing and learning of your employees and students. And you have a investor as the person with the highest salary.
Then your “school” is more of a financial institution than a school. And probably should be taxed as such.
The idea though is that a good sports team will draw eyes to the university as a whole. Texas, California, Tennessee, Florida… All these programs have vastly overpaid coaches it’s true. But as a result you get free advertising as fans wear the team colors all over town.
Also shameless plug for our college football community !cfb
And how do you propose to pay for this world class research in a world where federal university funding is constantly hamstrung by conservatives and skyrocketing tuition costs still can’t cover it? If I had the ability to charge 100,000 people 20 bucks (actually way more) a week, that’ll certainly create a dent (not to mention apparel revenue and TV contracts). Sports departments are net positive revenue for an institution, and when they aren’t they get cut. Again I fully believe that coaches are overpaid, but it’s not for no reason.
Here’s an article showing that only 25/65 Division I schools had a net positive revenue from sports: bestcolleges.com/…/do-college-sports-make-money/, with those losing money losing a lot more than the ones making money.
Here is the referenced list where you can check all D1 universities for this year.
Edit: And with TV deals being restructured I wouldn’t be surprised if the SEC/B1G start bringing in even more.
Double Edit: And regardless, alumni donations for academics increase relative to that teams performance (specifically championship appearances/wins) gceps.princeton.edu/wp-content/…/162rosen.pdf
Yeah, the few at the top bring in revenue, but most don’t. Speculating on future revenue is not helpful.
If you’d read the links I shared, you’d see the revenue figures include alumni donations, and they’re still a net negative for the majority of schools.
Title 9 is the definition of great idea but terrible execution. It has caused tons of men’s non revenue programs to fold in the past few decades. Notably, as a swimmer, the University of Iowa no longer has a men’s swim team, and they literally invented butterfly.
There’s really not a good solution. Non-revenue sports are always going to be facing cuts. If you limited to having similar sport offerings, then it’s probably only basketball, baseball/softball, and football/something that are offered, and even baseball is limited to a handful of universities.
If you limit scholarships like the current system, because football has so many scholarships, there needs to be 4-5 women’s sports to be balanced. If you add some rules to force offering a men’s team for each women’s team, then it’s a huge benefit for the men even if there aren’t scholarships available.
It’s perfectly possible to have a great sporting franchise and a great education at the same school. As they say, porque no los dos? This comment is clearly bitter towards sports for no reason.
The OP never said that the education wasn’t good, only that it was the side hustle
Like the other guy said: work on reading comprehension, you sound like an ex football player from HS who took one too many shots to the head and is now perma angry when he doesn’t understand basic sentences in English anymore
Maybe my reading comprehension is bad, but it seemed obvious to me user was replying to a specific comment seeing how it was a reply to that nerd comment instead of OP and post used the phrase “this comment”.
Never played and tested out at college level for reading in 5th grade. I’m just not bitter or delusional about “for profit” colleges paying the people who make them the most, the most money. Look at the Florida Gators. They spend like $12 million a year on coaching for a program that gets $40 million in profits to the school. No professor is going to bring in that. No professor is going to help a college that much. A profitable sports team brings in more money for a college than anyone else.
Its a bad theory. The university near me loses money on sport. Like 1-2m a year. The coach is the highest paid, of course. The annual budget of the universal is 900m. Sports is small potatoes compared to everything else.
The post never said that the side hustle was subpar. I did undergrad at a middling university and a mediocre sports, and I did grad school at a good school with a top tier basketball team.
To me, it seems the point of the post is that it is telling that there is a correlation. A well-funded university has a well-funded sports team. It sometimes feels the other way around with a well-funded sports team providing a well-funded school. Advocates of college sports actually tout that as feature.
It is so deeply rooted in our culture that I don’t even wear my alma mater hoodie because I don’t follow basketball. Sports is the only reason why anyone would that apparel, I guess.
I think the concept of a sports coach at an university is inteeresting in general. At Europe and the colleges here it doesn’t really matter which sports team your institution has as long as it offers good education. It is always interesting to see that for whatever reason it can be different.
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