I recently came across an article by Michael McCarthy in USA Today discussing a ‘quiet crisis in NCAA spending’. The article quotes directly from Myles brand, president of the NCAA, who suprisingly is raising the alarm about out of control athletic spending. He refers to this as a ‘quiet crisis’ because the internal conflict at these universities is mostly unseen by the public.
Athletic department spending is increasing at two to three times the annual rate of general university budgets, Brand said during SportsBusiness Journal’s 6th Annual Intercollegiate Athletic Forum. Only half a dozen major schools actually turn a profit on athletics, the NCAA president said. The rest are subsidized.
I, like most former college students I suspect, remember wondering why the athletic department at my university kept getting more and more new facilities while on-campus parking kept shrinking and tuition kept rising. New academic facilities seemed to be built with much less frequency than new playing fields and multi-million dollar practice facilities.
But Brand doesn’t blame spiraling head coaching salaries for the rise in athletic department spending. Roughly 75% of a head football coach’s salary is generated by outside sources, such as TV/radio deals and endorsements, he noted.
Instead, he blames the “coattails effect” of pricey assistant coaches, trainers, video technicians and equipment. “It’s everyone else. It’s the $400,000-$500,000 coordinator,” Brand says.
There are a lot of factors that contribute to this demand for athletics, but in my experience the primary source of pressure came from the local community that demands a top-tier athletic program in lieu of a professional sports team. This was even more ironic considering that only a small % of the local community are actual graduates of the university. But hometown pride means a lot.
To be sure, there are excesses across the university system, with salaries for tenured professors often reaching 6 figures, but in the past year the average salaries for major college football coaches reached $1 million. And this is for programs that are ancillary to the mission of the university.
How can we expect our universities to succeed and for students to ever get a break from yearly tuition increases when these schools have clearly misplaced their priorities? I applaud Myles Brand for taking a tough stance on athletic spending and I hope he will use his position to remind athletic boosters that students come first.
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July 8, 2008 at 1:29 pm
NP
This doesn’t surprise me (although it does sadden me). I was an admissions counselor for my alma mater after I graduated, and we were constantly making special considerations for athletic recruits, and while the football team got new uniforms, better equipment, more funding for whatever, the academic clubs were required to raise their own funds, the English Department offices were in the basement of a residence hall (nothing like hearing toilets flush during a lecture about Odysseus being tossed about the ocean!), and heating was hit-and-miss in the upperclassmen residence hall.
I admit that, as a private college, much of the funding for various things came from alumni and community contributions. *However,* any money given to the “general fund” was handed out at the discretion of the Powers That Be, which has led me to decide that, as an alumna, I will *never* donate to the general fund.
Nothing like the administration of a college deciding that money that was donated by a social work graduate passionate about her department should go to building the new weight room….