The Business of College Sports, Especially Football

In my last post, I noted that economics had recently forced Northeastern and Hofstra universities to give up football. They decided that the money they would spend on football could be better spent on what universities are supposed to be about--education. Today in the Washington Post, the Co-Chairmen of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics question the sustainability of the current college sports business model. They assail the popular view that all college football needs is a playoff instead of the current BCS bowl system and all will be well, and they note the reality that at least 44% of major college football programs can't exist without subsidies from the schools' general funds--money that in these times is sorely needed to fulfill other needs.

So it seems that the colleges and universities are beginning to question whether they should really be in the sports business, and, if so, how much into it they should be. Right? Not so fast, this piece that appeared in Thursday's Wall Street Journal says, "In college football, the most indispensable players are not necessarily star quarterbacks. Sometimes they're the overeager alumni who write big checks and weigh in from the sidelines". The article goes on to list the incredible donations made by University of Texas alumni to support the school's football program. After reading that piece, can anyone seriously think that the University of Texas again playing in the national championship game again results from athletic skill of its players and coaches alone? The answer is "no", and I believe all schools which compete at the top levels of college football agree. As a result, once they decide to compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision, they get on an inescapable treadmill of needing bigger and ever more expensive stadiums and other athletic facilities and hiring more and more high-priced coaches and spending more and more on the other expenses of running athletic programs like travel and recruiting to be able to win games in order to earn the money to sustain and expand the programs, which usually turn out not to be self-sustaining.

Not only that but also this week there was a press report that the Big Ten conference was seeking to add a 12th member so that it could have a conference title game just as other conferences like the SEC do, and, of course, that conference title game would bring in gobs of TV money just like the title games of the rival power conferences.

Well, as an Ivy League graduate, who has long believed that the Ivy League gets college sports right, I was really surprised to see that the Ivy League is getting into the big money act too. Now, the Ivies can't hope to match the popular and big money appeal of football, or even men's basketball, as played in the power conferences, but they do sometimes stack up pretty well in head-to-head competition against more-sports-oriented schools in lesser sports. Recently Bloomberg reported that the Ivy League is considering holding conference tournaments in men's and women's lacrosse to see which of its teams would get the right to appear in the NCAA lacrosse tournaments and was seeking sponsors to fund the tournaments. I don't see any rational reason for this other than the money involved. What is wrong with having the team with the best record in conference play in the regular season be the conference representative in the NCAA tournament? I could ask the same question about the college conference basketball tournaments played in every conference (I think!) except the Ivy League.

I'm as happy as the alum of any school when the athletes of my alma mater Harvard win a match, a game or a championship, but I do, like Chancellor Kirwan and President Turner in today's Washington Post, think that college sports must turn away from its semi-professional business model and our colleges and universities must concentrate on educating people for the 21st century. America's colleges and universities aren't revered the world for the athletic teams they put on the field or court. Let's leave the business of sports to the pros.