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It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship, when it's plain to see that football itself ha

It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship, when it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy (but there is no shortage of other non-academic activities that many students share, such as baseball...) And in cases like this, where students are leaving the game early, it's perhaps not an activity that students enjoy after all. Why can't the American football industry run itself more like the American baseball industry? Instead of leeching off universities, particularly public universities, they could be operating minor leagues independent of any educational system. (Defenders of the current system will often claim that football is profitable for universities and provides funding for academics, but that is only true in a very small number of schools, so I don't think that's a valid argument. It may well be the case in Alabama, but I still don't think it relevant since I take issue with the scheme as a whole, not merely on a case by case basis.)

harryh 7y ago
Many students who attend American universities aren't just buying education. They are buying a "college experience" of which sports are a major part.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  That might be a reason for the system to remain as it is, but it doesn't explain why the system is that way in the first place. Furthermore, if the desires of the students were really the root motivation, then Alabama wouldn't need to manipulate the desires of students by providing weird point-system incentives.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  And we should fix that. Sending kids to $100K parties that cripple their career prospects is bad. Fun is great, but not at this cost.
linuxftw 7y ago
There is college baseball. I'm firmly in the camp that sports have nothing to do with education, and there should be no association of organized sports and public educational institutions whatsoever. Gym class is one thing, but after-school sports have nothing to do with receiving a basic education.
- harryh 7y ago
  Why should schools only provide a basic education? There are a great many reasons to participate in after school sports: general health and fitness, teamwork, confidence, community. Schools can't do this too?
  - impendia 7y ago
    Intramural, participatory sports are a wonderful thing. I have never heard anyone argue against them. They don't require stadiums with amenities that would make royalty blush, nor seven-figure salaries paid to coaches.
    - briandear 7y ago
      Do you know what revenue the Florida State, Alabama, Texas A&M football programs bring in? The head coach if Texas A&M brings more revenue and prestige to the school (and thus higher student demand, more donations, and more licensing deals,) than some professor of gender studies does. The head coach of a top tier BCS school probably is responsible for more revenue than even the president of the university. Nobody would have ever heard of Clemson or Gonzaga without sports and most of the big state schools like Michigan would have a far lower demand without their sports programs. There is some argument that colleges shouldn’t be a feeder for the NBA or NFL. Couldn’t we say the same about Google or any other tech company? Why should the universities be feeders for talent for private business? It’s ridiculous when you consider it that way. Why should Google benefit from a San Jose State University computer science graduate if the 49ers shouldn’t benefit from a UCLA student athlete? Professional sports is a significant part of the US economy. [1] We could argue that programs such as gender studies, anthropology, or Classics are both heavily subsidized and pretty useless from an economic standpoint. Yet, we pay five-figure salaries to professors and six figure salaries to administrators affiliated with those fields. I am not arguing against the value of those fields per se, only pointing out that sports are a very significant part of society and the economy, like it or not. From the benefit of the university standpoint, sports have a tremendous impact. Not many people are proud of and donate to the University of Texas because of a world-renowned ancient literature program — but because of football. I don’t particularly like college football — I prefer baseball, however it is an exciting part of the year, especially if you are a student or alum. We waste billions of government money on ridiculous projects all the time. I think the price tag on California’s high speed train to Bakersfield is in the multi-billions? There is government funding to study the sex habits of tsetse flies? $38 million in federal money was wasted on a Ted Kennedy institute? We subsidize NPR and the National Endowment of the Arts. To be clear, I am not arguing against the National Endowment generally, only suggesting that most people don’t care about the next Mapplethorpe as they care about the next Tom Brady. Giving $5 of government money to subsidize an exhibition of Andres Serrano whose art featured a crucifix submerged in his own urine or $5 to a high school or college athletic program? Or $5 to a gender studies program? What choice would most people make? Personally, I would vote to just keep my $5 and let the people that wanted those programs to pay for it out of their own pocket. So why are we complaining about college sports again — something tens of millions of people care about. NPR has about 30 million listeners. College football has an audience of over 160 million people. [2] The LSU-Texas game last weekend had over 5 million viewers. That’s about 6 times as many viewers as CNN gets during prime time. [1] https://www.thestar.com/sports/football/2011/09/09/how_the_nfl_affects_the_us_economy.html https://www.thestar.com/sports/football/2011/09/09/how_the_n... [2] https://footballfoundation.org/news/2019/6/11/2018-19_Attendance_Release.aspx https://footballfoundation.org/news/2019/6/11/2018-19_Attend...
haunter 7y ago
>why we allow Who do you mean by we? I'm not familiar with the american university system but how much public (say tax) money does a private university like Stanford get (which also has a good football team).
- partialrecall 7y ago
  I am concerned primarily by the involvement of public schools. I think private schools doing it is also dumb, but perhaps it's their prerogative to be dumb in ways that shouldn't be tolerated from public schools.
impendia 7y ago
> Why can't the American football industry run itself more like the American baseball industry? I am a very strong opponent of the overwhelming sports culture at American universities, and of the absurd sums of money spent to sustain it. (Example: Dabo Swinney was just given a $93 million contract to remain the football coach of Clemson.) This >Defenders of the current system will often claim that football is profitable for universities and provides funding for academics is part of the reason. But the real argument is: successful football programs generate positive publicity for the school; they encourage more strong high school students to apply for admission; they encourage alumni to open their pocketbooks and donate. Personally, as a professor at an American university, I don't buy it. But evidently my bosses do.
- whyenot 7y ago
  > they encourage more strong high school students to apply for admission By encouraging more students to apply, they have the opportunity to turn down more applicants and appear more selective, boosting their position in college rankings. The whole thing is ridiculous. We are supposed to be educating students, not giving them brain damage.
- qws 7y ago
  Is it really still profitable in e.g. that case of Dabo Swinney landing a 93 million dollar contract?
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    Clemson pulls in about $50M / year from football alone, not counting any tangentially related revenue it may generate.
  - pitt1980 7y ago
    The places where the profitability of football is in question is basically everything lower than the 5 main conferences (Big 10, SEC, ACC, Big XII, and Pac 10), and especially the schools lower than that level which aren't reliable winners. (Think the San Jose State's of the world) Clemson football generated 50 million dollars last year https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/sports/college/clemson/2019/07/20/staying-power-clemson-football-revenue-million/1736799001/ https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/sports/college/clemso... While 93 million over 10 years works out to being a pretty sizable chunk of that for one employee, yeah, its still a profitable enterprise
bgilroy26 7y ago
I think we will look back on this period of American universities (between say the 1980s and whenever the NFL gets a basic minor league) as a great aberration. College sports were meant to be clubs of enthusiasts from the student body, not a parallel big business. Maybe as an intermediate step, you could have schools that sponsor the teams and offer scholarships for when the players leave professional sports. That would be nice for the players involved because they would be a bit older and better able to take advantage of their studies.
- impendia 7y ago
  > I think we will look back on this period of American universities as a great aberration. I hope so. Athletics are only the tip of the iceberg. Tuition at universities like Harvard, Princeton, etc. runs around $45,000 a year. Even at public universities, it tends to be over $10,000 a year. This is tuition, mind you, not counting room and board. These figures are vastly higher than a generation ago, and are continuing to skyrocket. Needless to say, this is inflicting crippling debt on huge numbers of college students. Meanwhile, universities are hiring fewer and fewer tenure-track professors; increasingly, the teaching is being done by people working under terrible job conditions. See, for example, this as an example: https://pankisseskafka.com/2017/07/16/rate-my-jil-2018-this-is-what-a-dead-discipline-looks-like/ https://pankisseskafka.com/2017/07/16/rate-my-jil-2018-this-... I am an insider -- a college professor at an American university. The current system is thoroughly screwed. We need a big reset.
  - partialrecall 7y ago
    Tuition rates for Harvard and Princeton in particular are deceptive since if you earnestly cannot afford that tuition, they don't ask you to pay it. Those schools are often actually cheaper than public schools for people without much money. Other expensive private-nonprofit schools may be another matter entirely. But those two are bad examples to use.
    - cosmie 7y ago
      > Those schools are often actually cheaper than public schools for people without much money. While this is true on paper, it's not always the case in practice. I was able to get multiple acceptance offers to Ivy League schools, and poor enough to have the sliding scale of tuition slide all the way to $0. But all of them had an estimated cost of attendance[1] so optimistic about ancillary expenses during the school year that it was infeasible to actually go to any of them. There were other implicit barriers to acceptance as a poor kid as well, but the way the sliding scale was implemented was the biggest. I chose a state school instead. Despite a higher paper cost higher than the Ivy League schools offering free tuition, the total out of pocket cost for attendance of the state school worked out significantly lower. [1] Federal loans and many scholarships won't pay out over the university's estimated cost of attendance. By zero'ing out tuition and room and board, that just leaves the "books and personal expenses" line item,
ramphastidae 7y ago
If one simply takes the behavior of the vast majority of universities in the US at face value it should be quite clear. Their priority is not education, it is profit. That's really it. Believing otherwise is like believing the priority of health insurance companies is public health or the priority of for-profit prisons is rehabilitation.
- harryh 7y ago
  The vast majority of universities in the US are non-profit institutions.
  - magduf 7y ago
    "Non-profit" doesn't mean that profit isn't the primary motive. It just means you can't show any profit, or return it to shareholders, as in a corporation. Instead, you do things like giving the University President an absurdly enormous salary, plus put him up in a lavish mansion, or go on a construction spree, building more and more very expensive buildings and stadiums, or give a 7-figure salary to the football coach.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - mcguire 7y ago
      One of my fondest memories from school was the biennial renovations of the dean of natural sciences' offices.
  - ramphastidae 7y ago
    Can you elaborate how you think that applies to this discussion? Seems like you are arguing semantics to me. The Church of Scientology is a considered a non-profit institution in the U.S. as well. Do you believe that The Church of Scientology is a benevolent actor? I don't. I believe their primary purpose is profit and they are taking advantage of their followers and the U.S. taxpayer in the same way these universities are. The university in this article is "non-profit" as well, but they just granted a $70+ million contract to their football coach. I don't see how you can argue that this is appropriate for a non-profit institution whose priority is education when they are charging their 30,000+ undergraduates six figures to complete a four-year degree at the same time.
aphextim 7y ago
There was push-back a while ago to where the schools were using the student's identity for college based video games and profiting off the student's names, and the students never saw anything from it. There was a suit and the college kids won! https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/18/sports/ncaa-video-game-lawsuit-60-million-settlement-is-approved.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/18/sports/ncaa-video-game-la...
- journalctl 7y ago
  College football players need a union. The upper echelons make millions, and the students get a free ride and traumatic brain injuries. Hardly a fair deal.
  - grogenaut 7y ago
    A lot of students don't really get a free ride. They get a free ride to be on the team, like an unpaid internship. The realities of a D1 team is that, depending on the school and the player, barely go to school. In D1 the priority is Sports, Academics. I played in D3 where the priority is Academics, Sports. We calculated we spent at least 800 hours per season on the sport. About 3000 hours over 4 years. D1 sports is more like 2000+ hours per season (aka a full job). Imagine how well you'd do at a full time uni if you were working 8 hours a day in construction at the same time. And that's if the school prioritizes you playing sports. Personally I think they should be allowed to get a education benefit that grants them one free year of classes for every year of sports played for use at any time in their lives post sports. That way when they end the sports dream they can get the education they paid for by working.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      > In D1 the priority is Sports, Academics. That is an uncharitable overgeneralization. There are 345 D1 schools. Many, if not most, do not have that prioritization.
      - grogenaut 7y ago
phil248 7y ago
Given the increasing public backlash to football-related injuries, specifically brain injuries, this is likely a problem that will solve itself over time. There's an increasingly small pool of parents who are willing to let their children play a sport where there's a very slim chance of professional success but a pretty high chance of permanent brain damage.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  Unfortunately under the current system, parents are motivated to let their kids play the game not just by the prospect of professional success, but also by the prospect of admission into a school. If football were brought into line with other college club sports, the pressure to pick football in particular would be diminished. People looking for academic scholarships could instead choose to play something less hazardous, without worrying that they were limiting their opportunities.
frogpelt 7y ago
Your question seems to indicate that you aren't from the United States. College football is just one sport among many popular college sports in the U.S. It began as a club-type extra curricular activity but as it became more popular universities likely saw it as a way to market their school and attract customers (students). The top 30-40 programs produce $100 million in revenue which is usually enough to be self-sustaining and help pay for all the other sports teams on campus. College basketball, baseball, football, track and field, and even hockey in some places are de facto minor leagues. The power and influence of the NFL is probably more to blame for the lack of a proper minor league in football.
- owlninja 7y ago
  Also, NFL career average is something like 3 years. They take a beating and I don't think the NFL would take people who had taken a beating for a few years after college. In fact lately there has been a trend of top talent sitting out their college bowl game just to avoid any risk of injury.
endorphone 7y ago
"Defenders of the current system will often claim that football is profitable for universities and provides funding for academics" It is spectacularly profitable at some schools, and often provides funding for the entire athletics departments (every scholarship for every fringe sport, etc). https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2019/09/12/college-football-most-valuable-clemson-texas-am/#206ed6d7a2e7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2019/09/12/college-f... Of course it isn't profitable for all schools, but it certainly is for Alabama, and for most of the other schools that generally come up in the "football is expensive" discussion. It isn't academic, but at the same time neither is music, or the arts, or many other essential elements of many post-secondary experiences. It has always been about more than the pure sciences or maths.
wnevets 7y ago
>It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship, Money, lots and lots of money.
headcanon 7y ago
I hate it too, but its clearly profitable - people want to watch football and spend money on tickets and merchandise, and universities ended up being a good vehicle to drive fanbases. Its not realistic to ask people to not want to be football fans and not spend money on that interest, and not realistic to ask universities to not take that money. The most realistic potential improvement I can see is requiring public universities to reinvest some percentage of sports program profits (mostly coming from football/basketball in the US) back into academic programs and tuition assistance for non-athletes. Currently many unversities have academics and sports existing in separate financial universes. Edit: The same universities do reinvest football/basketball profits back into other sports programs, which is great. Athleticism in general is IMO an essential part of education. But universities need to remember their core mission is education, and everything that a university does needs to feed that mission somehow.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  > "I hate it too, but its clearly profitable" That's not clear to me. Google tells me there are nearly 800 university football teams in America. Alabama is obviously top-tier and is doubtlessly profitable. But how many of the other hundreds are profitable?
  - headcanon 7y ago
    The statement was scoped to NCAA Division 1 schools, which I imagine all have profitable football programs. However most of those also happen to be top-tier academic and research schools as well (there are of course exceptions), so I'm comfortable scoping the conversation to those schools.
    - partialrecall 7y ago
      Well as I said previously, I take issue with the scheme as a whole. Furthermore, don't many players, coaches, etc, transfer up from lower divisions when they demonstrate themselves to have exceptional merit? It's not clear to me that Division 1 wouldn't be impacted if the lower divisions were eliminated. If that's true, then lower divisions are effectively subsidizing higher divisions, so it's a mistake to consider the matter on a case by case basis rather than holistically.
aripickar 7y ago
Football in general provides massive benefits to Universities. 1. Football (and mens basketball) are forced to pay more or less for the rest of all the other sports on campus[0]. Because of Title IX, student athletes/scholarships provided need to be equal across gender, which means that there need to be women's teams, which almost always lose money. You can make an argument that there shouldn't be other men's sports that lose money, but thats not what is being discussed. 2. Football/Collegiate sports in general are major drivers of diversity in colleges that are lacking in them. I've heard that at UC Berkeley that over half of black male students are athletes. Those are students that are very valuable for administrators trying to bring diversity to campuses. 3. Good football (and men's basketball) teams increase the rankings for the schools in general[1]. This has a demonstrable effect on student applications[2]. 4. The culture around football games is that of partying. You go out, drink for a couple of hours before the game, and then stand in the sun for a couple of hours cheering for your team. They're fun when they're competitive, but Alabama was playing competition that was sub-par, so the games were out of hand by the end. Watching something exciting is fun. Watching something boring is not. In my opinion, Nick Saban (Alabama's football coach) is probably the most underpaid state employee in the US. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/sportsmoney/2011/05/05/does-football-fund-other-sports-at-college-level/#71207afe71c2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/sportsmoney/2011/05/05/does-foo... [1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co... [2]https://www.nber.org/papers/w7227 https://www.nber.org/papers/w7227
- s1artibartfast 7y ago
  Regarding 1) Can the title IX issue be resolved by separating the sport budgets from academic budgets? If the football programs receive no money from the general budget, is their mere existence discriminatory, assuming equal numbers of scholarships are given to female athletes?
  - aripickar 7y ago
    No, the number of scholarships is the issue, not the source of the dollars.
- 7y ago
slg 7y ago
>it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy Sports are part of a traditional old-school liberal arts education. That is why the Ivy League schools have some of the largest athletic departments in the country even though they don't generate revenue anywhere close to schools like Alabama or Ohio State. It is really no different than a school having a music or a theater program. Alabama just so happens to be the Juilliard of football. There are certainly some schools that shouldn't be spending what they do on their athletic department, but the idea that they need to generate a profit is just as flawed as expecting a public school's theater department to turn a profit. That said, there is no question that Alabama makes a solid profit on their football team. Also the baseball industry is run differently because minor league baseball exists. There is not much of a minor league system in either basketball or football that provides a well defined development path for high school athletes. Both the NBA, NFL, and various independent organizations have tried developing them over the years, but college athletics is still the primary route for all American born professional basketball and football players. Universities and the NCAA are just taking advantage of that market need for minor league sports.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Sports are part of a traditional old-school liberal arts education. A traditional, old-school liberal arts education consists of exactly the seven liberal arts, divided into the trivium ([Latin] grammar, logic, and rhetoric) followed by the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, theory of music, and astronomy.) The slightly less old-school version takes the old trivium deemphasizes formal logic, and adds Greek, history, moral philosophy, and poetry.
  - slg 7y ago
    I should have been more specific. I was not referring to a European or Renaissance idea of Liberal Arts, but more the 19th century US version that was used as the basis for a large number of American universities especially in the Northeast. Athletics and fitness played a central part in the educational experience there. Once again, that is why Ivy League schools generally have athletics departments that rank among the largest in the nation in terms of number of participants.
nyolfen 7y ago
strong athletic performance drives alumni donations, that’s it
jumpman500 7y ago
>it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy I disagree with this. I was a college athlete. I firmly believe that being an athlete teaches you more about being a leader, a teammate and having discipline than almost anything else. Those are extremely desirable skills to have in any work place. I do think any team based activity can build the same skills if there's a common goal to be achieved. College athletes just have the guarantee that they've been doing it for multiple years. Football players get picked on all the time because of a lot incorrect stereotypes about the people that do it. Not all football players are idiots. Look up John Urschel.
- criddell 7y ago
  > Not all football players are idiots. There are probably some who wouldn't be accepted to their school on academic merit alone. Aside from that, I'm very opposed to college football (and soccer) as it's played now because of what we know know about brain injuries. I wouldn't be surprised to see a class action lawsuit in the future from current players that shuts down the programs at a lot of smaller schools. Any coach working today knows that the way they are asking the kids to play will injure them.
dghughes 7y ago
> It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship, when it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, People are arguing in the comments about the money, history and prestige US football brings to colleges in the US. I have to wonder in other parts of the world does soccer have such sway over universities? Are there universities that have soccer programs that bring in large sums of money for the university? Soccer (football to the rest of the world) is probably 100 times as big with arguably ~6.5 billion vs ~300 million fans. It probably generates 100 times the profit of US football. It would be odd that the US college and football relationship is so strong when soccer is immensely bigger in every way.
- hobofan 7y ago
  > I have to wonder in other parts of the world does soccer have such sway over universities? Are there universities that have soccer programs that bring in large sums of money for the university? Here in Germany I am not aware of any substantial sports teams by universities. Universities here also generally don't offer any scholarships for athletes. AFAIK, the situation in the rest of Europe is similar. The sports programs that are offered at universities here are very casual and comparable to a cheaper gym membership in purpose.
trianglem 7y ago
This is a very uninformed, topical response. Football on college basically pays for all other sport on campus. Athletics are an extremely important part of a well rounded education (today more that ever!). A lot of activities and school pride are based on the sports team so the benefits there are enourmous if not tangible or quantifiable immediately.
the_watcher 7y ago
> And in cases like this, where students are leaving the game early, it's perhaps not an activity that students enjoy after all. This is completely misunderstanding what's happening. They're leaving early because the game is already decided. When the score is 62-10 in the 4th quarter, you're no longer watching a competition.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  If the game is meant to entertain the students, and the students are no longer entertained by that particular instance of the game, then why is it so important to the school that students remain inside the stadium? It really seems to me that the school has somehow made these student/spectators a product in some way. Perhaps it looks better to network television if the stadium stays packed the entire game?
  - kube-system 7y ago
    Yes, it obviously is a better image to have your school look engaged, rather than absent, on national TV. But the other reason (for schools with prominent teams) is that the number of seats available is often less than the number of students who might want to attend, so to be fair to students who actually want to attend, it becomes necessary to disincentive people from requesting tickets if they’re not serious about attending. It’s pretty common for schools to give out tickets in a lottery system, and then penalize your future ability to successfully get a ticket if you show a pattern of not actually using the tickets. Back when I was in school, this was tracked by scanning the tickets when you entered.
the_watcher 7y ago
> Why can't the American football industry run itself more like the American baseball industry? Instead of leeching off universities, particularly public universities, they could be operating minor leagues independent of any educational system. College baseball exists, and some of the best teams in the country are from public universities. It's also generally considered a revenue sport (although admittedly not on the level of football).
Nasrudith 7y ago
It is of course perfectly possible to be a fan of football, sane, and show a proper sense of proportion. Really in some cases football isn't big fron being a cash cow or "lotto ticket" for a society that views it as an acceptable way to make it big but frankly a cult. It doesn't matter to them if it is a poor investment or if there are horrifying human costs. It is an end to itself and all who question it are the enemy. Penn State and their Sandusky handling is a particularly infamous example of the mentality. The local fervor is what leads to its undue emphasis where voters balk at funding for textbooks or class sizes but approve oversized stadiums without a thought. Undue emphasis is a symptom of anti-intellectualism in that they don't value education or view it as actively "betraying" their culture in a tall poppy way. Football is a way to get rich without "betrayal" of their self-perpetuated station. That aside I suspect the institutions adapt to this by knowing that a football team raises their public profile more than academics. Which could be considered a "tradition" - a legacy of population and education. Since during industrial eras the vast body to market to were farm and factory families who never went to college - regardless of intelligence they would have little reason outside of personal interest to follow the academic details. This isn't a sleight on them - most don't follow areas of expertise outside their profession except for personal interest. Even if outdated for the purpose the institutions are still in place.
rongenre 7y ago
Once, on a hiring committee, someone said their definition of a "decent [American] college" was "You've heard of their football team". I suspect that's a pretty prevalent opinion, wrong as it may be.
guywaffle 7y ago
The ncaa is just legal slavery. That includes college baseball.
- kube-system 7y ago
  College athletes participate voluntarily.

harryh 7y ago

Many students who attend American universities aren't just buying education. They are buying a "college experience" of which sports are a major part.

partialrecall 7y ago
That might be a reason for the system to remain as it is, but it doesn't explain why the system is that way in the first place. Furthermore, if the desires of the students were really the root motivation, then Alabama wouldn't need to manipulate the desires of students by providing weird point-system incentives.
lonelappde 7y ago
And we should fix that. Sending kids to $100K parties that cripple their career prospects is bad. Fun is great, but not at this cost.

linuxftw 7y ago

There is college baseball. I'm firmly in the camp that sports have nothing to do with education, and there should be no association of organized sports and public educational institutions whatsoever. Gym class is one thing, but after-school sports have nothing to do with receiving a basic education.

harryh 7y ago
Why should schools only provide a basic education? There are a great many reasons to participate in after school sports: general health and fitness, teamwork, confidence, community. Schools can't do this too?
- impendia 7y ago
  Intramural, participatory sports are a wonderful thing. I have never heard anyone argue against them. They don't require stadiums with amenities that would make royalty blush, nor seven-figure salaries paid to coaches.
  - briandear 7y ago
    Do you know what revenue the Florida State, Alabama, Texas A&M football programs bring in? The head coach if Texas A&M brings more revenue and prestige to the school (and thus higher student demand, more donations, and more licensing deals,) than some professor of gender studies does. The head coach of a top tier BCS school probably is responsible for more revenue than even the president of the university. Nobody would have ever heard of Clemson or Gonzaga without sports and most of the big state schools like Michigan would have a far lower demand without their sports programs. There is some argument that colleges shouldn’t be a feeder for the NBA or NFL. Couldn’t we say the same about Google or any other tech company? Why should the universities be feeders for talent for private business? It’s ridiculous when you consider it that way. Why should Google benefit from a San Jose State University computer science graduate if the 49ers shouldn’t benefit from a UCLA student athlete? Professional sports is a significant part of the US economy. [1] We could argue that programs such as gender studies, anthropology, or Classics are both heavily subsidized and pretty useless from an economic standpoint. Yet, we pay five-figure salaries to professors and six figure salaries to administrators affiliated with those fields. I am not arguing against the value of those fields per se, only pointing out that sports are a very significant part of society and the economy, like it or not. From the benefit of the university standpoint, sports have a tremendous impact. Not many people are proud of and donate to the University of Texas because of a world-renowned ancient literature program — but because of football. I don’t particularly like college football — I prefer baseball, however it is an exciting part of the year, especially if you are a student or alum. We waste billions of government money on ridiculous projects all the time. I think the price tag on California’s high speed train to Bakersfield is in the multi-billions? There is government funding to study the sex habits of tsetse flies? $38 million in federal money was wasted on a Ted Kennedy institute? We subsidize NPR and the National Endowment of the Arts. To be clear, I am not arguing against the National Endowment generally, only suggesting that most people don’t care about the next Mapplethorpe as they care about the next Tom Brady. Giving $5 of government money to subsidize an exhibition of Andres Serrano whose art featured a crucifix submerged in his own urine or $5 to a high school or college athletic program? Or $5 to a gender studies program? What choice would most people make? Personally, I would vote to just keep my $5 and let the people that wanted those programs to pay for it out of their own pocket. So why are we complaining about college sports again — something tens of millions of people care about. NPR has about 30 million listeners. College football has an audience of over 160 million people. [2] The LSU-Texas game last weekend had over 5 million viewers. That’s about 6 times as many viewers as CNN gets during prime time. [1] https://www.thestar.com/sports/football/2011/09/09/how_the_nfl_affects_the_us_economy.html https://www.thestar.com/sports/football/2011/09/09/how_the_n... [2] https://footballfoundation.org/news/2019/6/11/2018-19_Attendance_Release.aspx https://footballfoundation.org/news/2019/6/11/2018-19_Attend...

haunter 7y ago

>why we allow Who do you mean by we? I'm not familiar with the american university system but how much public (say tax) money does a private university like Stanford get (which also has a good football team).

partialrecall 7y ago
I am concerned primarily by the involvement of public schools. I think private schools doing it is also dumb, but perhaps it's their prerogative to be dumb in ways that shouldn't be tolerated from public schools.

impendia 7y ago

> Why can't the American football industry run itself more like the American baseball industry? I am a very strong opponent of the overwhelming sports culture at American universities, and of the absurd sums of money spent to sustain it. (Example: Dabo Swinney was just given a $93 million contract to remain the football coach of Clemson.) This >Defenders of the current system will often claim that football is profitable for universities and provides funding for academics is part of the reason. But the real argument is: successful football programs generate positive publicity for the school; they encourage more strong high school students to apply for admission; they encourage alumni to open their pocketbooks and donate. Personally, as a professor at an American university, I don't buy it. But evidently my bosses do.

whyenot 7y ago
> they encourage more strong high school students to apply for admission By encouraging more students to apply, they have the opportunity to turn down more applicants and appear more selective, boosting their position in college rankings. The whole thing is ridiculous. We are supposed to be educating students, not giving them brain damage.
qws 7y ago
Is it really still profitable in e.g. that case of Dabo Swinney landing a 93 million dollar contract?
- EpicEng 7y ago
  Clemson pulls in about $50M / year from football alone, not counting any tangentially related revenue it may generate.
- pitt1980 7y ago
  The places where the profitability of football is in question is basically everything lower than the 5 main conferences (Big 10, SEC, ACC, Big XII, and Pac 10), and especially the schools lower than that level which aren't reliable winners. (Think the San Jose State's of the world) Clemson football generated 50 million dollars last year https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/sports/college/clemson/2019/07/20/staying-power-clemson-football-revenue-million/1736799001/ https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/sports/college/clemso... While 93 million over 10 years works out to being a pretty sizable chunk of that for one employee, yeah, its still a profitable enterprise

bgilroy26 7y ago

I think we will look back on this period of American universities (between say the 1980s and whenever the NFL gets a basic minor league) as a great aberration. College sports were meant to be clubs of enthusiasts from the student body, not a parallel big business. Maybe as an intermediate step, you could have schools that sponsor the teams and offer scholarships for when the players leave professional sports. That would be nice for the players involved because they would be a bit older and better able to take advantage of their studies.

impendia 7y ago
> I think we will look back on this period of American universities as a great aberration. I hope so. Athletics are only the tip of the iceberg. Tuition at universities like Harvard, Princeton, etc. runs around $45,000 a year. Even at public universities, it tends to be over $10,000 a year. This is tuition, mind you, not counting room and board. These figures are vastly higher than a generation ago, and are continuing to skyrocket. Needless to say, this is inflicting crippling debt on huge numbers of college students. Meanwhile, universities are hiring fewer and fewer tenure-track professors; increasingly, the teaching is being done by people working under terrible job conditions. See, for example, this as an example: https://pankisseskafka.com/2017/07/16/rate-my-jil-2018-this-is-what-a-dead-discipline-looks-like/ https://pankisseskafka.com/2017/07/16/rate-my-jil-2018-this-... I am an insider -- a college professor at an American university. The current system is thoroughly screwed. We need a big reset.
- partialrecall 7y ago
  Tuition rates for Harvard and Princeton in particular are deceptive since if you earnestly cannot afford that tuition, they don't ask you to pay it. Those schools are often actually cheaper than public schools for people without much money. Other expensive private-nonprofit schools may be another matter entirely. But those two are bad examples to use.
  - cosmie 7y ago
    > Those schools are often actually cheaper than public schools for people without much money. While this is true on paper, it's not always the case in practice. I was able to get multiple acceptance offers to Ivy League schools, and poor enough to have the sliding scale of tuition slide all the way to $0. But all of them had an estimated cost of attendance[1] so optimistic about ancillary expenses during the school year that it was infeasible to actually go to any of them. There were other implicit barriers to acceptance as a poor kid as well, but the way the sliding scale was implemented was the biggest. I chose a state school instead. Despite a higher paper cost higher than the Ivy League schools offering free tuition, the total out of pocket cost for attendance of the state school worked out significantly lower. [1] Federal loans and many scholarships won't pay out over the university's estimated cost of attendance. By zero'ing out tuition and room and board, that just leaves the "books and personal expenses" line item,

ramphastidae 7y ago

If one simply takes the behavior of the vast majority of universities in the US at face value it should be quite clear. Their priority is not education, it is profit. That's really it. Believing otherwise is like believing the priority of health insurance companies is public health or the priority of for-profit prisons is rehabilitation.

harryh 7y ago
The vast majority of universities in the US are non-profit institutions.
- magduf 7y ago
  "Non-profit" doesn't mean that profit isn't the primary motive. It just means you can't show any profit, or return it to shareholders, as in a corporation. Instead, you do things like giving the University President an absurdly enormous salary, plus put him up in a lavish mansion, or go on a construction spree, building more and more very expensive buildings and stadiums, or give a 7-figure salary to the football coach.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mcguire 7y ago
    One of my fondest memories from school was the biennial renovations of the dean of natural sciences' offices.
- ramphastidae 7y ago
  Can you elaborate how you think that applies to this discussion? Seems like you are arguing semantics to me. The Church of Scientology is a considered a non-profit institution in the U.S. as well. Do you believe that The Church of Scientology is a benevolent actor? I don't. I believe their primary purpose is profit and they are taking advantage of their followers and the U.S. taxpayer in the same way these universities are. The university in this article is "non-profit" as well, but they just granted a $70+ million contract to their football coach. I don't see how you can argue that this is appropriate for a non-profit institution whose priority is education when they are charging their 30,000+ undergraduates six figures to complete a four-year degree at the same time.

aphextim 7y ago

There was push-back a while ago to where the schools were using the student's identity for college based video games and profiting off the student's names, and the students never saw anything from it. There was a suit and the college kids won! https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/18/sports/ncaa-video-game-lawsuit-60-million-settlement-is-approved.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/18/sports/ncaa-video-game-la...

journalctl 7y ago
College football players need a union. The upper echelons make millions, and the students get a free ride and traumatic brain injuries. Hardly a fair deal.
- grogenaut 7y ago
  A lot of students don't really get a free ride. They get a free ride to be on the team, like an unpaid internship. The realities of a D1 team is that, depending on the school and the player, barely go to school. In D1 the priority is Sports, Academics. I played in D3 where the priority is Academics, Sports. We calculated we spent at least 800 hours per season on the sport. About 3000 hours over 4 years. D1 sports is more like 2000+ hours per season (aka a full job). Imagine how well you'd do at a full time uni if you were working 8 hours a day in construction at the same time. And that's if the school prioritizes you playing sports. Personally I think they should be allowed to get a education benefit that grants them one free year of classes for every year of sports played for use at any time in their lives post sports. That way when they end the sports dream they can get the education they paid for by working.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    > In D1 the priority is Sports, Academics. That is an uncharitable overgeneralization. There are 345 D1 schools. Many, if not most, do not have that prioritization.
    - grogenaut 7y ago

phil248 7y ago

Given the increasing public backlash to football-related injuries, specifically brain injuries, this is likely a problem that will solve itself over time. There's an increasingly small pool of parents who are willing to let their children play a sport where there's a very slim chance of professional success but a pretty high chance of permanent brain damage.

partialrecall 7y ago
Unfortunately under the current system, parents are motivated to let their kids play the game not just by the prospect of professional success, but also by the prospect of admission into a school. If football were brought into line with other college club sports, the pressure to pick football in particular would be diminished. People looking for academic scholarships could instead choose to play something less hazardous, without worrying that they were limiting their opportunities.

frogpelt 7y ago

Your question seems to indicate that you aren't from the United States. College football is just one sport among many popular college sports in the U.S. It began as a club-type extra curricular activity but as it became more popular universities likely saw it as a way to market their school and attract customers (students). The top 30-40 programs produce $100 million in revenue which is usually enough to be self-sustaining and help pay for all the other sports teams on campus. College basketball, baseball, football, track and field, and even hockey in some places are de facto minor leagues. The power and influence of the NFL is probably more to blame for the lack of a proper minor league in football.

owlninja 7y ago
Also, NFL career average is something like 3 years. They take a beating and I don't think the NFL would take people who had taken a beating for a few years after college. In fact lately there has been a trend of top talent sitting out their college bowl game just to avoid any risk of injury.

endorphone 7y ago

"Defenders of the current system will often claim that football is profitable for universities and provides funding for academics" It is spectacularly profitable at some schools, and often provides funding for the entire athletics departments (every scholarship for every fringe sport, etc). https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2019/09/12/college-football-most-valuable-clemson-texas-am/#206ed6d7a2e7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2019/09/12/college-f... Of course it isn't profitable for all schools, but it certainly is for Alabama, and for most of the other schools that generally come up in the "football is expensive" discussion. It isn't academic, but at the same time neither is music, or the arts, or many other essential elements of many post-secondary experiences. It has always been about more than the pure sciences or maths.

wnevets 7y ago

>It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship, Money, lots and lots of money.

headcanon 7y ago

I hate it too, but its clearly profitable - people want to watch football and spend money on tickets and merchandise, and universities ended up being a good vehicle to drive fanbases. Its not realistic to ask people to not want to be football fans and not spend money on that interest, and not realistic to ask universities to not take that money. The most realistic potential improvement I can see is requiring public universities to reinvest some percentage of sports program profits (mostly coming from football/basketball in the US) back into academic programs and tuition assistance for non-athletes. Currently many unversities have academics and sports existing in separate financial universes. Edit: The same universities do reinvest football/basketball profits back into other sports programs, which is great. Athleticism in general is IMO an essential part of education. But universities need to remember their core mission is education, and everything that a university does needs to feed that mission somehow.

partialrecall 7y ago
> "I hate it too, but its clearly profitable" That's not clear to me. Google tells me there are nearly 800 university football teams in America. Alabama is obviously top-tier and is doubtlessly profitable. But how many of the other hundreds are profitable?
- headcanon 7y ago
  The statement was scoped to NCAA Division 1 schools, which I imagine all have profitable football programs. However most of those also happen to be top-tier academic and research schools as well (there are of course exceptions), so I'm comfortable scoping the conversation to those schools.
  - partialrecall 7y ago
    Well as I said previously, I take issue with the scheme as a whole. Furthermore, don't many players, coaches, etc, transfer up from lower divisions when they demonstrate themselves to have exceptional merit? It's not clear to me that Division 1 wouldn't be impacted if the lower divisions were eliminated. If that's true, then lower divisions are effectively subsidizing higher divisions, so it's a mistake to consider the matter on a case by case basis rather than holistically.

aripickar 7y ago

Football in general provides massive benefits to Universities. 1. Football (and mens basketball) are forced to pay more or less for the rest of all the other sports on campus[0]. Because of Title IX, student athletes/scholarships provided need to be equal across gender, which means that there need to be women's teams, which almost always lose money. You can make an argument that there shouldn't be other men's sports that lose money, but thats not what is being discussed. 2. Football/Collegiate sports in general are major drivers of diversity in colleges that are lacking in them. I've heard that at UC Berkeley that over half of black male students are athletes. Those are students that are very valuable for administrators trying to bring diversity to campuses. 3. Good football (and men's basketball) teams increase the rankings for the schools in general[1]. This has a demonstrable effect on student applications[2]. 4. The culture around football games is that of partying. You go out, drink for a couple of hours before the game, and then stand in the sun for a couple of hours cheering for your team. They're fun when they're competitive, but Alabama was playing competition that was sub-par, so the games were out of hand by the end. Watching something exciting is fun. Watching something boring is not. In my opinion, Nick Saban (Alabama's football coach) is probably the most underpaid state employee in the US. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/sportsmoney/2011/05/05/does-football-fund-other-sports-at-college-level/#71207afe71c2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/sportsmoney/2011/05/05/does-foo... [1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co... [2]https://www.nber.org/papers/w7227 https://www.nber.org/papers/w7227

s1artibartfast 7y ago
Regarding 1) Can the title IX issue be resolved by separating the sport budgets from academic budgets? If the football programs receive no money from the general budget, is their mere existence discriminatory, assuming equal numbers of scholarships are given to female athletes?
- aripickar 7y ago
  No, the number of scholarships is the issue, not the source of the dollars.
7y ago

slg 7y ago

>it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy Sports are part of a traditional old-school liberal arts education. That is why the Ivy League schools have some of the largest athletic departments in the country even though they don't generate revenue anywhere close to schools like Alabama or Ohio State. It is really no different than a school having a music or a theater program. Alabama just so happens to be the Juilliard of football. There are certainly some schools that shouldn't be spending what they do on their athletic department, but the idea that they need to generate a profit is just as flawed as expecting a public school's theater department to turn a profit. That said, there is no question that Alabama makes a solid profit on their football team. Also the baseball industry is run differently because minor league baseball exists. There is not much of a minor league system in either basketball or football that provides a well defined development path for high school athletes. Both the NBA, NFL, and various independent organizations have tried developing them over the years, but college athletics is still the primary route for all American born professional basketball and football players. Universities and the NCAA are just taking advantage of that market need for minor league sports.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Sports are part of a traditional old-school liberal arts education. A traditional, old-school liberal arts education consists of exactly the seven liberal arts, divided into the trivium ([Latin] grammar, logic, and rhetoric) followed by the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, theory of music, and astronomy.) The slightly less old-school version takes the old trivium deemphasizes formal logic, and adds Greek, history, moral philosophy, and poetry.
- slg 7y ago
  I should have been more specific. I was not referring to a European or Renaissance idea of Liberal Arts, but more the 19th century US version that was used as the basis for a large number of American universities especially in the Northeast. Athletics and fitness played a central part in the educational experience there. Once again, that is why Ivy League schools generally have athletics departments that rank among the largest in the nation in terms of number of participants.

nyolfen 7y ago

strong athletic performance drives alumni donations, that’s it

jumpman500 7y ago

>it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy I disagree with this. I was a college athlete. I firmly believe that being an athlete teaches you more about being a leader, a teammate and having discipline than almost anything else. Those are extremely desirable skills to have in any work place. I do think any team based activity can build the same skills if there's a common goal to be achieved. College athletes just have the guarantee that they've been doing it for multiple years. Football players get picked on all the time because of a lot incorrect stereotypes about the people that do it. Not all football players are idiots. Look up John Urschel.

criddell 7y ago
> Not all football players are idiots. There are probably some who wouldn't be accepted to their school on academic merit alone. Aside from that, I'm very opposed to college football (and soccer) as it's played now because of what we know know about brain injuries. I wouldn't be surprised to see a class action lawsuit in the future from current players that shuts down the programs at a lot of smaller schools. Any coach working today knows that the way they are asking the kids to play will injure them.

dghughes 7y ago

> It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship, when it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, People are arguing in the comments about the money, history and prestige US football brings to colleges in the US. I have to wonder in other parts of the world does soccer have such sway over universities? Are there universities that have soccer programs that bring in large sums of money for the university? Soccer (football to the rest of the world) is probably 100 times as big with arguably ~6.5 billion vs ~300 million fans. It probably generates 100 times the profit of US football. It would be odd that the US college and football relationship is so strong when soccer is immensely bigger in every way.

hobofan 7y ago
> I have to wonder in other parts of the world does soccer have such sway over universities? Are there universities that have soccer programs that bring in large sums of money for the university? Here in Germany I am not aware of any substantial sports teams by universities. Universities here also generally don't offer any scholarships for athletes. AFAIK, the situation in the rest of Europe is similar. The sports programs that are offered at universities here are very casual and comparable to a cheaper gym membership in purpose.

trianglem 7y ago

This is a very uninformed, topical response. Football on college basically pays for all other sport on campus. Athletics are an extremely important part of a well rounded education (today more that ever!). A lot of activities and school pride are based on the sports team so the benefits there are enourmous if not tangible or quantifiable immediately.

the_watcher 7y ago

> And in cases like this, where students are leaving the game early, it's perhaps not an activity that students enjoy after all. This is completely misunderstanding what's happening. They're leaving early because the game is already decided. When the score is 62-10 in the 4th quarter, you're no longer watching a competition.

partialrecall 7y ago
If the game is meant to entertain the students, and the students are no longer entertained by that particular instance of the game, then why is it so important to the school that students remain inside the stadium? It really seems to me that the school has somehow made these student/spectators a product in some way. Perhaps it looks better to network television if the stadium stays packed the entire game?
- kube-system 7y ago
  Yes, it obviously is a better image to have your school look engaged, rather than absent, on national TV. But the other reason (for schools with prominent teams) is that the number of seats available is often less than the number of students who might want to attend, so to be fair to students who actually want to attend, it becomes necessary to disincentive people from requesting tickets if they’re not serious about attending. It’s pretty common for schools to give out tickets in a lottery system, and then penalize your future ability to successfully get a ticket if you show a pattern of not actually using the tickets. Back when I was in school, this was tracked by scanning the tickets when you entered.

the_watcher 7y ago

> Why can't the American football industry run itself more like the American baseball industry? Instead of leeching off universities, particularly public universities, they could be operating minor leagues independent of any educational system. College baseball exists, and some of the best teams in the country are from public universities. It's also generally considered a revenue sport (although admittedly not on the level of football).

Nasrudith 7y ago

It is of course perfectly possible to be a fan of football, sane, and show a proper sense of proportion. Really in some cases football isn't big fron being a cash cow or "lotto ticket" for a society that views it as an acceptable way to make it big but frankly a cult. It doesn't matter to them if it is a poor investment or if there are horrifying human costs. It is an end to itself and all who question it are the enemy. Penn State and their Sandusky handling is a particularly infamous example of the mentality. The local fervor is what leads to its undue emphasis where voters balk at funding for textbooks or class sizes but approve oversized stadiums without a thought. Undue emphasis is a symptom of anti-intellectualism in that they don't value education or view it as actively "betraying" their culture in a tall poppy way. Football is a way to get rich without "betrayal" of their self-perpetuated station. That aside I suspect the institutions adapt to this by knowing that a football team raises their public profile more than academics. Which could be considered a "tradition" - a legacy of population and education. Since during industrial eras the vast body to market to were farm and factory families who never went to college - regardless of intelligence they would have little reason outside of personal interest to follow the academic details. This isn't a sleight on them - most don't follow areas of expertise outside their profession except for personal interest. Even if outdated for the purpose the institutions are still in place.

rongenre 7y ago

Once, on a hiring committee, someone said their definition of a "decent [American] college" was "You've heard of their football team". I suspect that's a pretty prevalent opinion, wrong as it may be.

guywaffle 7y ago

The ncaa is just legal slavery. That includes college baseball.

kube-system 7y ago
College athletes participate voluntarily.