(12-16-2014 10:54 AM)Attackcoog Wrote: (12-16-2014 10:26 AM)ballhog Wrote: Many times, the anti-football "academics", who say too much is spent on athletics, don't take into account the non-monetary benefits of athletics such as increased enrollment, good will, higer caliber of students, community outreach...
Although, I'm not so sure this was the case with UAB football.
^^^^^^^^THIS^^^^^^^^^
Athletics functions as the public face of the university and it's primary advertising/marketing department. How many marketing departments make money? The fact that the schools have a marketing model that generates literally hundreds of hours of mini infomercials (that are watched by millions on national tv), hundreds of press articles, and thousands of mentions on radios and water coolers ------AND are actually able to recover much of the costs via ticket, media agreements, and other forms of revenue is actually pretty impressive.
I disagree with many college sports fans on this. A loss of $20m a year is a huge sum of money. For any university. And I think the UAB's calculations are not misleading in the least. In fact, I think administrators and athletics people hide their true losses for a reason. They don't want parents to know about it.
Lots of schools have dropped football in 1-AA and lived to tell the tale. Boston U. dropped it 15 years ago, and they just joined the AAU with test scores skyrocketing. A lot of the Cals don't have it and they are doing just fine without it (i.e. San Diego, Santa Barbara, Irvine, etc.)
I agree with many of you that football is great for some schools, and adds to academics. For instance, BC, ND, Boise St., and several others. But the sports economist did a study that showed for losing schools (someone has to lose) there is actually a sheen of failure that comes with sports. Take Rutgers for instance. They have dropped 25 spots in the USNWR academic rankings over the last several years, and surveys into the thinking of high school students have shown that Rutgers is associated with losing. It's actually an excellent academic school, but as much as sports colors our perceptions of universities, it can damage them too.
Lastly, I'll say that when college sports people are interviewed, they will defend sports until their dying breath because their jobs are on the line. I've seen excellent internal suggestions made by academics and administrators who have a positive view of college sports rejected by ADs because they don't want to have a drop in support for a sport on their resume. In one example, a school was willing to take a loss on ice hockey (which would have brought together the campus community) but could no longer abide by $25m losses for football. The AD was adamantly against the perfectly sensible plan.
Schools should be willing to lose some money on sports, but the kinds of money being lost now at many schools is absolutely untenable in an era of huge budget cuts to higher education.