bonus points for stopping the exploitation of college athletes for corporate $$$!
posted by supermedusa at 9:53 AM on April 6 [11 favorites]

I will send this to every professor I know, but I imagine sports are like every other money-involved thing, where these things exist because they’re institutionally-subsidized but privately profitable for the people pulling the strings
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:08 AM on April 6 [8 favorites]

My understand is that they're profitable for the schools, since they bring in a lot of donations from alumni.
posted by aubilenon at 10:14 AM on April 6 [12 favorites]

The growth of college sports (despite most programs losing money) makes more sense if you understand that they are marketing endeavors designed to increase exposure to and loyalty from students (past, present, and future), donors, and (in the case of public institutions), people in the school's geographic area who may not have any personal connection to the school, but like having some team to watch and root for.
posted by Kibbutz at 10:14 AM on April 6 [9 favorites]

"We're going to give the football team a university they can be proud of"
posted by lalochezia at 10:19 AM on April 6 [7 favorites]

This is an idea whose time has come! It will never happen in America, but it should. The people footing the bill for amateur/collegiate and minor league sports should be professional sports teams who use the leagues to train and recruit. Kids going to college just to have a chance to get recruited into the NBA or NFL etc, is ludicrous. That’s not what higher education is for.
posted by pjsky at 10:23 AM on April 6 [8 favorites]

. . . and in the case of middling-to-lesser Division III schools, athletics are a recruiting tool to attract students who want to keep playing sports (especially football, which is a powerful tool to recruit the elusive male high school graduate to come to the school).

On average, student-athletes comprise
31% of the student body at Division III
institutions. (This percentage ranges
from 1.5% to more than 74%.)
posted by Kibbutz at 10:32 AM on April 6 [3 favorites]

Would it be weird if I emailed this to my provost?
Maybe I'll start with the chair.
posted by Adridne at 10:39 AM on April 6 [1 favorite]

My understand is that they're profitable for the schools, since they bring in a lot of donations from alumni.

A lot of those donations are specifically earmarked for the sports programs, though. That article is about major sports programs, but the same pattern repeats on a smaller scale at other schools.

The growth of college sports (despite most programs losing money) makes more sense if you understand that they are marketing endeavors designed to increase exposure to and loyalty from students (past, present, and future), donors, and (in the case of public institutions), people in the school's geographic area who may not have any personal connection to the school, but like having some team to watch and root for.

That might be* all well and good in the long run, but universities are in an acute crisis. Pulling money from athletics programs is an excellent near-term solution. It sure as hell beats the alternative, cutting teaching and research in order to keep sports programs going.

* It's absolutely unconscionable in the case of football and other sports that cause a disproportionate amount of brain injuries, though.
posted by jedicus at 10:41 AM on April 6 [7 favorites]

Back in the fall of 1970, when I started my four years at UC Santa Barbara, protestors had burned down the local branch of Bank of America back in May, and the school had canceled the whole football program. The bank got rebuilt, but the football team never came back.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:44 AM on April 6 [8 favorites]

I mean, a good place to start would be for all schools to agree to salary/compensation caps on coach salaries. Doing away with sports seems extreme - I'm not a sports person myself, but a lot of people like them, especially students and alumni, and even some faculty. But it's totally possible for people to enjoy college sports that aren't quasi-professional.
posted by coffeecat at 10:45 AM on April 6 [1 favorite]

Top-tier and power conference D-1 programs aren't at all money losers when looked at holistically. They generate large amounts of contributions that aren't credited to the athletic budget. They are major drivers of the significant overfunding by legislators of the flagship schools over the directional schools. They are significant drivers of tuition revenue because "big time sports" are extremely attractive to the demographic of kids whose parents can pay full tuition, and who otherwise would be just as happy to go to a D-2/D-3 private or directional school.

I agree with Kibbutz that D-III schools get a significant benefit from sports too. "Jocks" aren't the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Colby, Williams, Hamilton and Colgate, but they all have (proportionately) very large intercollegiate sports programs, and D-3 jocks tend to be the kids of full tuition payers and (with the career paths they follow) the future donors and full-tuition paying parents those schools need.
posted by MattD at 10:46 AM on April 6

but universities are in an acute crisis. Pulling money from athletics programs is an excellent near-term solution.

Again, change the phrase "athletic programs" to "marketing, recruiting, branding, and advertising", and your contention will only accelerate the death spiral of many of these schools.
posted by Kibbutz at 10:51 AM on April 6

Ok, I now looked at the cited source for "they lose money" and the sources of revenue listed are:
-student fees (I presume this means the fee students pay to play a season)
-media rights
-ticket sales
-donor contributions and endowments (presumably only those that are sports-specific)

So, that doesn't capture the income from say, students who decide to attend [x] place because they want to attend a place with a sports culture, or people who make other sorts of donations who are connected to the institution, in part do to sports loyalty.

But again, you can achieve that without paying a coach $13 million a season.
posted by coffeecat at 10:55 AM on April 6 [1 favorite]

Again, change the phrase "athletic programs" to "marketing, recruiting, branding, and advertising", and your contention will only accelerate the death spiral of many of these schools.

I don't think the idea is to end these programs forever (although I stand by ending football forever; if a school can only survive on the broken bodies and minds of football players, it deserves to fail). I think the idea is to find the revenue needed to tell the Trump administration to go jump in a lake and ride out the storm.

In any event, demographics are going to be the death of plenty of schools over the next couple of decades, no matter how well funded their athletics programs are. Better to go down focused on academics and telling fascists to get fucked than to capitulate.
posted by jedicus at 10:55 AM on April 6 [8 favorites]

College sports aren’t going to go away, but I agree with the author of the article that if enough university presidents announced the immediate end of their athletic programs BECAUSE OF DRACONIAN DOGE CUTS to their very important research programs — boosters, fans and donors might be willing to raise a stink and push back on Trump’s assault on higher education. That would be f**king awesome. Also, every black athlete in America should refuse to play for a school that killed its DEI programs.
posted by pjsky at 10:57 AM on April 6 [9 favorites]

To be fair to the article, it's not actually talking about banning college sports, it's talking about putting them on pause for one year as a protest move against Trump. If it was actually talking about banning college sports completely and forever, you could have the alternative title of "Let's Never Win Another Olympic Medal".

The people footing the bill for amateur/collegiate and minor league sports should be professional sports teams who use the leagues to train and recruit. Kids going to college just to have a chance to get recruited into the NBA or NFL etc, is ludicrous. That’s not what higher education is for.

Some people, even very smart people, actually enjoy participating in athletics and want to compete at a high level. College sports provide an avenue and infrastructure for athletics that can't be easily replicated individually, in the same way that building an interstate highway system would be practically impossible without the involvement of the federal government. There is no major professional league for the vast majority of college sports that could be expected to fund a sport - like, Stanford is almost a lock to win the Capital One cup for women's sports every year, mostly because they dominate in everything people don't pay any attention to. For a lot of athletes in sports like that, it's the last chance they'll have to compete outside of a local rec league. Viewing college as a primarily a place to stuff your brain with stuff is a totally valid viewpoint, but I don't think saying that's all it's for accounts for all the other ways that the college experience prepares people for life outside of academia.

That said, the funding and money situation in college sports is going insane with TV deals and conference realignment and I wouldn't be at all disappointed if the "money" sports had a lot less influence on everything else. Having four schools from the west coast in the mostly midwest-based Big Ten is madness. Stanford and Cal being in the otherwise east coast-based ACC (pace SMU) is insanity - and it's all been done for football dollars, not anything that the women of Stanford that crush everybody do. As far as college funding and expenditure, I'd think the first step would be to divorce football from anything to do with conferences and just have it be its own thing (the bowl subdivision, which contains the big name schools, is already not governed by the NCAA).
posted by LionIndex at 11:00 AM on April 6 [1 favorite]

-student fees (I presume this means the fee students pay to play a season)

I'm pretty sure this refers to fees all university students pay as part of their enrollment.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:23 AM on April 6 [3 favorites]

The assertion that sports are not profitable ventures for colleges and universities seems highly suspect. It is a massive money-making industry for everyone involved (except students/players, of course), which is why they have these programs in the first place.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn schools are using the same accounting tricks that movie studios use to claim poverty, and for the same reasons, to deal with taxation and actors, writers, and studio workforce who ask for better wages and protections from exploitation.

If sports really were really money-losing operations, schools would have already dropped them, Trump or no.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:41 AM on April 6 [4 favorites]

You can play sports. You can watch professionals play sports.

You don't need to siphon money from municipalities to do that. You don't need to bulldoze neighborhoods to do that. You don't need to hamstring an academic institution to do that. You don't need to slyly encourage teens to ruin themselves gambling to do that. You don't need to watch young people completely destroy their bodies to do that. You don't need billionaire owners threatening to move their teams unless they're given tax breaks to do that. You don't need to attack trans kids to do that.

You can play sports. You can watch professionals play sports. How about we just do that, and not the other shit.
posted by phooky at 11:44 AM on April 6 [8 favorites]

This is absurd.

Yes, college sports in general is absurd. But colleges and universities make enormous amounts of money from sports, and more than that... they get huge donations from sports.

Some schools are just sports businesses with some classes on the side.
posted by SoberHighland at 11:55 AM on April 6

My former ag school state University in the Pacific Northwest recently had a situation where the administration was taking significant money away from academic departments to pay the multimillion-dollar shortfall in the athletic budget. That's a shitty situation that should not happen, in my view.
posted by vitia at 11:59 AM on April 6 [4 favorites]

I'll take "shit that will never happen" for $500.
posted by axiom at 12:01 PM on April 6 [3 favorites]

It's not just the universities that make money from college sports.
Spokane hosted the regionals of the women's march madness last weekend and it brought millions of dollars to the city.
The recent uptick in popularity of women's college hoops has certainly put a spotlight on women's basketball in general, generating great interest in the WNBA, which in turn injects millions into the economies of those cities.
posted by OHenryPacey at 12:22 PM on April 6 [1 favorite]

Some schools are just sports businesses with some classes on the side.

Maybe require 50% of all sports revenue go to academics?
posted by Thorzdad at 12:35 PM on April 6 [1 favorite]

The big football schools make money from sports. Not all colleges do.

From the big 10: Rutgers’ athletics deficit topped $70M again in 2023-24. But it still wasn’t a record.
posted by armacy at 12:46 PM on April 6 [4 favorites]

I agree that college athletics in the money sports, is not a great thing, and money is just making it worse.

I have two sons, both of whom got accepted to some pretty great schools, because they were great water polo players. And the youngest still has two years of eligibility, so let's not do this for a while...

Not sure either of them would have been accepted at these schools otherwise. And while eldest got his elbow destroyed in a late night getting hit by a car scenario, (he was likely totally wasted, but hasn't admitted that yet), and losing a year. And then COVID. And losing his senior season because not enough credits or some bullshit.

Young one has some injury issues, but academically, he is no Barack Obama. Still got in...

And being a student athlete does seem to provide some focus. And camaraderie. So I am very glad they found this place. And so far, they are both very good men, and I am proud of them.
posted by Windopaene at 1:13 PM on April 6 [2 favorites]

First off, let me be clear: I think football is so dangerous that it should be banned.

But, I'm highly suspicious of the data here. The Slate article says:

"The scholar Scott Hirko gathered data for 229 public Division I schools and found that in 2022 [emphasis mine] just 18 of them had profitable athletics programs."

But the linked analysis was published in 2022 but focuses on 2020 data. You know, a year that had a few things going on in the world. As far as I can see anywhere in the source data, he doesn't make an effort to account for the Covid effect. In fact, the dataset is meant to highlight that year.

Other data I'm seeing suggests that 71% (165 universities) school athletic programs break even or are profitable. All programs combined turned a profit just shy of half a billion.

So, feel free to have opinions about whether or not college sports should be a thing. But take your data sources with a grain of salt (including mine... I'm not an expert but just see question marks in the Slate reporting).
posted by robot_jesus at 1:18 PM on April 6 [3 favorites]

which in turn injects millions into the economies of those cities.
posted by OHenryPacey at 12:22 PM

I thought studies done during lockouts/strikes showed that sports teams do not really “inject” any money into local economies (people still spend when they can’t go to a sports game, they just spend it somewhere else).
posted by The Notorious SRD at 2:07 PM on April 6 [2 favorites]

I wouldn't be surprised to learn schools are using the same accounting tricks that movie studios use to claim poverty, and for the same reasons, to deal with taxation and actors, writers, and studio workforce who ask for better wages and protections from exploitation.


Yep, the main thesis of the argument doesn't hold up because college athletics "loses" money for the same reason Hollywood "loses" money making movies - to hide how much money is being made, because if people knew that, their arguments for "amateurism" (and remember, amateurism is class warfare) would be even more threadbare than they are, and thus would be even harder to argue that players should not be paid for their labor. This is why you have exorbitant salary costs (and while head coach salaries get the headlines, the real story has been in the expansion of athletic department staffing) and millions invested in showpiece facilities (beyond the slush fund aspect, in a world where schools can't compete on salary like they should these egowank facilities serve as recruitment tools) - because the schools need to plead poverty in order to claim that there is no way to pay players for their labor.

I mean, a good place to start would be for all schools to agree to salary/compensation caps on coach salaries.

The NCAA tried that once. Resulted in them eating a $50M lawsuit in the 90s over being a wage-fixing cartel, because it turns out that without a collective bargaining agreement setting up salary caps, that's exactly what you're arguing for (and such cartels are illegal in the US for good reason.)

If it was actually talking about banning college sports completely and forever, you could have the alternative title of "Let's Never Win Another Olympic Medal".

Olympic athletes by and large don't compete in the NCAA, because the NCAA's restrictions on compensation make it difficult for them to fund their training at the elite level.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:18 PM on April 6 [3 favorites]

I thought studies done during lockouts/strikes showed that sports teams do not really “inject” any money into local economies (people still spend when they can’t go to a sports game, they just spend it somewhere else).

There's probably a difference between what OHenryPacey cited - a college tournament being held in a town using existing facilities where people are traveling in to see their teams play - vs something like a pro team trying to get civic funding to build a new facility. I think the latter case, where the pro teams will talk about boosting the local economy, has largely been debunked and cities are starting to vote against funding facilities for their billionaire sports team owners. But something like the College World Series that happens in Omaha every year?
posted by LionIndex at 2:18 PM on April 6 [1 favorite]

My understand is that they're profitable for the schools, since they bring in a lot of donations from alumni.

A lot of those donations are specifically earmarked for the sports programs, though.

You can't neglect the number of alumni who are reliable donors to the general fund, etc., who will declare, "You'll never see another dime from me if you cancel [insert alum's favorite sport here.]"
posted by BrashTech at 2:18 PM on April 6

Sports are profitable. Betting on sports is hella profitable. Everything in the US has to lead to profits. I went to a tiny Quaker college with low-key sports, no sports scholarships. Games were fun. I've also been to football games at Ohio State, and it's so far removed from the role of the university, it's not funny.
posted by theora55 at 3:35 PM on April 6

Olympic athletes by and large don't compete in the NCAA, because the NCAA's restrictions on compensation make it difficult for them to fund their training at the elite level.

There are certainly some athletes who don't (or didn't) compete in college, like Noah Lyles, but "by and large" is a stretch. The entire US women's and men's gymnastics teams competed at the college level. My alma mater has dominated women's swimming lately thanks to the Walsh sisters. Katie Ledecky and Torri Huske both went to Stanford. Leon Marchand, the French swimmer who won a bunch of medals, attends Arizona State. Sha'carri Richardson competed at LSU. Gabrielle Thomas competed at Harvard. Quincy Hall competed at South Carolina. Cole Hocker went to Oregon. Grant Fisher went to Stanford. Grant Holloway went to Florida. People like Coco Gauff, in a sport where teens regularly compete at a high professional level, have no need to ever step on a collegiate field, but college athletics is huge in developing abilities elsewhere.
posted by LionIndex at 3:46 PM on April 6

SoberHighland: "college sports in general is absurd. But colleges and universities make enormous amounts of money from sports, and more than that... they get huge donations from sports."

maybe colleges and universities cancelling the sports for a year in an effort to regain money for academics would encourage the donors to examine their own fucking priorities then
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:46 PM on April 6 [3 favorites]

The entire US women's and men's gymnastics teams competed at the college level.

Here's the thing, though, for the women competing in college tends to happen later in their careers because of how elite women's gymnastics works. So pointing to them as "look, they're competing in college" misses the point, as for many of them their Olympic years are behind them (though hopefully that's beginning to change.)

Katie Ledecky and Torri Huske both went to Stanford.

Ledecky is a perfect example of my point, as she tried to compete at Stanford, but the NCAA's rules on endorsement money at the time forced her out, as she needed the endorsement income to fund her training at the elite level. A similar thing happened with Tiger Woods back in the day - he went pro while still having eligibility at Stanford because the NCAA put him through a bunch of bullshit over having dinner with a top pro golfer (because he was an up and comer everyone had their eyes on), and he decided the headache wasn't worth the aspirin.

but college athletics is huge in developing abilities elsewhere.

Not really, if you take a look at it. For many elite athletes, it's actually a step back from the world elite level that they're already competing in (which isn't surprising when you compare the scope and breadth of the NCAA pool versus the world elite/professional level.) Even in sports where it could be viewed as a step forward, it's more akin to a finishing school - and the bullshit the NCAA puts athletes through makes many decide to opt out.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:45 PM on April 6

Also, it's worth pointing out that the situation has begun to change as of late, as the courts continue to tell the NCAA that no, it doesn't have the legal right to dictate to athletes how they manage their careers.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:51 PM on April 6

Seems like a silly hater fantasy, but if you want to permanently kill football through health and safety concerns, please do.

bonus points for stopping the exploitation of college athletes for corporate $$$!

because the NCAA's restrictions on compensation make it difficult for them to fund their training at the elite level.

Not sure why we're no-selling NIL, but I think these statements are lot less applicable than they would have been in like 2019.
posted by fleacircus at 4:53 PM on April 6

FWIW, Murray Sperber's books on the money surrounding athletics and higher education are worth a read. Beer & Circus, from what I recall of citing it in my dissertation, lays out some of the parameters of the debate.
posted by vitia at 4:55 PM on April 6

Not sure why we're no-selling NIL, but I think these statements are lot less applicable than they would have been in like 2019.

Because the NCAA has continued to fuck around with things like NIL and non-NCAA prize money even after Alston, so it hasn't been clear sailing for athletes even now. That said, they have been pushing back in the courts successfully, as the NCAA is learning what antitrust law actually means.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:57 PM on April 6

I would like to point out that universities manage to exist in the rest of the world without massive sports programs. They exist in Canada for example, but are a tiny fraction of the size/funding of American programs. We have our own issues (Focusing way to much on foreign students subsidizing the schools is a big one, rather then funding them from the public coffers as we should be doing), but we manage to get by and do good research and teaching.
posted by Canageek at 5:05 PM on April 6 [2 favorites]

Well I hope more athletes are able to escape the morass of evil filthy college athletics to get to the socially important and ethically pure realm of the Olympics, and thereby boost the notoriously feeble US teams.
posted by fleacircus at 5:33 PM on April 6

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