Big time American college sports should be minor league sports
I saw something on Mastodon the other day that encapsulates what I think about big time American college sports: if the highest-paid official at a school is the football or basketball coach, it's not a school, it's a sports franchise with a side hustle in tertiary education. And it stuns me that the highest-paid public official in most states is either a football coach or a basketball coach. The best paid public official in the state of California isn't the governor, and it's not someone doing something useful for the whole state. It's Chip Kelly, head football coach at the University of California, Los Angeles, who will make $6.1 million this year (LA Times). And he's not even close to being the highest paid state official in the US. The head football coach at Alabama, Nick Saban, makes an average of $11.7 million. Per year. (Source: AL.com)
There's a lot of discussion among sports writers and fans about NCAA conference realignment (Wikipedia article for anyone not already following along at home) and whether it makes sense and how it's driven by the enormous amounts of TV money to be made in bigtime college sports. But what I keep thinking is that these operations ought to be spun off as the minor leagues for professional football and basketball that they are. Private schools can do what they want, but my pie-in-the-sky dream is that public universities be forbidden by their respective states from fielding athletic teams at anything above the Division III level, which is the level at which they don't offer sports scholarships. Research and educational institutions should stick to research and education.
But the Division I schools make money from these big athletic operations, right? The thing is, Forbes says they mostly don't. Most Division I schools in fact can't cover their costs for the big expensive sports from the sales of tickets, etc, and you know what covers those cost when donors don't, which is a lot of the time? Student fees.
There's a lot of discussion among sports writers and fans about NCAA conference realignment (Wikipedia article for anyone not already following along at home) and whether it makes sense and how it's driven by the enormous amounts of TV money to be made in bigtime college sports. But what I keep thinking is that these operations ought to be spun off as the minor leagues for professional football and basketball that they are. Private schools can do what they want, but my pie-in-the-sky dream is that public universities be forbidden by their respective states from fielding athletic teams at anything above the Division III level, which is the level at which they don't offer sports scholarships. Research and educational institutions should stick to research and education.
But the Division I schools make money from these big athletic operations, right? The thing is, Forbes says they mostly don't. Most Division I schools in fact can't cover their costs for the big expensive sports from the sales of tickets, etc, and you know what covers those cost when donors don't, which is a lot of the time? Student fees.
Comments
Every year, the library department would have to cut its budget by around 5% every year for the last six years. They have been cut to the bone, to the point where any more cuts would impact their accreditation
The student fees you mention are through the roof. It is to the point where the student associations have said no more.
And full disclosure: My daughter was a Division I athlete (in a non-revenue producing sport at a public university).
The system is very broken, and what we’re seeing now has been coming for decades. I’ve gotten to see a closer look at the business of college sports—and it is a big business—than many do, and what I’ve seen has been troubling.
I don’t know what the answer is—it’s likely too late for some of the best answers.
And yet for all the troubles and the brokenness, I’d still rather watch college football than pro-football. As for basketball, I love college basketball, but I probably haven’t watched an NBA game in at least 30 years.
A University football team in the UK would be a Student Union club (rather than something the University organises) and the only people following it would be the players' girl/boyfriends and a few other hangers on, so it being a thing outside the University is a bit alien to us.
Sole exception - Oxford/Cambridge boat race.
American college sports are organized into three divisions:
Division III: schools do not offer sports scholarships but do have athletic departments and fund sports teams. Students who play sports do so for their own enjoyment, but there will be fan groups for the football and basketball teams, and at some schools also the hockey and/or baseball teams. I went to a Division III school and I sometimes attended hockey and baseball games.
Division II: there are sports scholarships with certain caps and the schools tend to be smaller than Division I. The schools typically don't have a well-known national reputation and they play against other schools in their region. Sports are helping some students fund college, but the point is to go to college.
Division I: the schools are big and attract the best athletes, a few of which will go on to professional leagues or the Olympics. Their football and/or men's basketball teams have national reputations and enormous regional followings akin to those of professional sports teams. Los Angeles, the second biggest city in the country, didn't have a pro football team for something like 20 years and people didn't care because we have UCLA and USC, two Division I schools. The fourteen largest football stadiums are for college football, with the biggest pro football stadium only #15. The biggest one, at the University of Michigan, seats over 107,000 and is the third largest stadium in the world. The games are televised and covered in news media the way people teams are covered. The teams have huge fan bases because there are tens of thousands of students at these schools and they continue to be fans (and sometimes donors) after graduation. Some people choose to attend these schools in part because of the sports culture - they're not athletes, but they want to go to a school with a big-name football program.
I suppose if you wanted to reform it - they could be spun off into stand alone teams with a historic connection, maybe offering discounted tickets to students and alumni of their associated institution and being allowed to fundraiser on campus and from alumni lists, but primarily seeking commercial sponsorship.
And they're rare as hens' teeth and only at a tiny handful of Universities.
No outright sports scholarships but varying levels of thumbs being applied at certain colleges in the past (probably less so now, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was the odd undergrad doing land management or geography who had less than stellar academic results).
American college sports is a multi-billion dollar per year industry. More precisely, college football and men's basketball are multi-billion dollar industries. Someone is making a tremendous amount of money here, even if it isn't the schools or the athletes.
At the very least it might be a good idea for the NCAA to separate football and men's basketball from other sports. Currently all sports at a given college or university are in the same league/conference. It might make business sense for the football team from a college in California to compete against a college three time zones away in New Jersey (though I can't think that kind of travel does much for the players academically). To require this of the swim team or fencers seems extra pointless.
The big football schools have big competitive marching bands, yes, but the scholarship programs for them vary significantly. Alabama awards some band members scholarships of between $500 to $1000 a year - that's not going to finance someone's college education. Michigan does not appear to offer any band scholarships, as far as I can tell from their website.
Division I football teams have around 90 or 100 members, while their marching bands may have 300 or 400 - the schools aren't giving scholarships to band members the way they are to football players.
Maybe it is time for the pro football and basketball teams to give back to the college teams. Set up some fund which colleges can draw from to continue their level of play.
I was a Division III participant way back when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth. While we played because we enjoyed the game, it was very hard to balance classes with a sport and next to impossible to work on the side. Many D3 players took out heavy student loans to continue in college. Quite a few had to drop out of college because they just could not go on.
For that matter, not every D1 athlete gets a full ride scholarship. Some get either breaks in college fees or stipends that go to education. Around 43% do not get any financial support tied to their athletic skills.
There are also lots of big D1 schools that don’t have that kind of sports program or following. The university I attended is D1 and currently has around 20,000 students. (It was 10,000 when I was there.). There is no football—98 D1 schools don’t have football. And the following is similarly limited to people with ties to the school. That’s despite having a very strong men’s soccer program and some very good seasons recently in men’s basketball.
For big time college sports programs fitting this description, we’re mainly (but not exclusively) talking about football and men’s basketball at schools in what have been known as the “Power Five” conferences—the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big Ten Conference, the Big 12 Conference, the Pac-12 Conference, and the Southeastern Conference. (Realignment, of course, will shake this up, especially for the PAC-12.) There are certainly schools outside the Power Five where this description also fits or I where things are moving in that direction, particularly in the conferences known as the “Group of Five”—the American Athletic Conference, Conference, the Mid-American Conference, the Mountain West Conference, and the Sun Belt Conference. (My daughter was an athlete at a school in a Group of Five conference.)
But there are lots of D1 schools where things haven’t gotten to that point. The Ivy League, for example, is a D1 conference. The Power Five represent around 20% of D1 schools, and the Group of Five a little less.
Part of the challenge is that the strong football and men’s basketball programs operate as good advertisement for the school. Schools that win the NCAA* men’s basketball championship see applications go up. While many students/prospective students don’t care about sports, a lot do, and see string football and basketball programs as an indication of the quality of student life, as well as of status. Schools are reluctant to give that up.
I agree. The NCAA used to allow sports at the same school to be in different divisions, which would mean different conferences, but that’s no longer allowed except for some schools grandfathered in. And there’s the odd case like Notre Dame being in the ACC, except for football. I think all of this could use some re-examination.
*The National Collegiate Athletic Association is the association of colleges and universities that regulates collegiate athletics in the US, and that had the three divisions @Ruth described. It sponsors national championship tournaments in every sport except football; for historical reasons, football has its own ranking and championship setup.
One other point about D3 schools I was going to make, but forgot, is that currently there are 53 pro football players that have come from their division. There are currently 10 D3 players in the NBA with 4 more playing on international teams.
"The other kind of football" - what is that please? There are several others I can think of - Rugby Union, Rugby League, Aust Rules, and Soccer for starters.
This is awesome. I love that all 15 on the team signed the petition. Solidarity forever.
I saw the varsity rugby at Twickenham one year. It was much less of a thing than the boat race (which is an institution all of its own), but a bit more of a thing than one might expect a rugby game between two universities to be.
There are still a number of athletic clubs at the university level. While women's soccer (football) is an official collegiate sport, men's soccer carries on as an athletic club at many universities. Likewise, rowing. Women official collegiate sport. Men, athletic club. Here at WSU, both the men and women rowing teams practice together at the time, even with the same coaches. The men, though, are considered an athletic club.