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I’m finally feeling better after being sick the last few days. This news probably cured me. We’ve got yet another commitment to Extra Points Library to announce. Come on down, Incarnate Word!
Thanks to EPL, UIW can now get the most updated, accurate, and affordable college sports data out there, from athletic department budget benchmarking to vendor contracts, coach compensation data, admin salary info, and more. If you’re an athletic department, sports management department, consulting group, newsroom, or other organization that needs accurate info, click here to learn about how EPL can serve your organization.
Many of you know that I don’t have a traditional journalism background. I have a degree in political science from The Ohio State University, where I took exactly one formal writing course. The vast majority of my professional education has come either on the job, or in self-directed reading while off the clock.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. Some coursework and lived experience in and around government has made it a little easier for me to write about political coalitions, how lobbying power works, and how various ideas make their way through the legislative sausage-making process into law. I didn’t think that was going to be important to my beat a decade ago, but nowadays, it’s more useful to me than knowing the intricacies of the Triangle and 2 defensive strategies.
But I certainly understand there are gaps in my education. These days, I honestly wish I understood philosophy and psychology better than I do policy, because so many of the major questions in college athletics governance can’t properly be addressed by pouring over balance sheets or studying the arcane dark arts of NCAA policymaking. They’re about values and feelings.
Consider, for example, this recent editorial in Inside Higher Ed, from Tim Sands, the current president of Virginia Tech.
There is no question that DI-level athletics benefit the university by advancing regional and national branding and creating an indelible bond through shared experiences between students, alumni and the institution. The latter brings application demand, enrollment yield, partnerships and sponsorships.
The former drives philanthropy and the local economy, especially in small college towns like Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech. The problem is, we can’t accurately quantify the aggregate indirect financial impact of athletics on the university. Instead of making rational decisions about athletics expenditures, these decisions are largely driven by emotion.
…
I think my colleagues who are presidents and chancellors at DI institutions fully understand the unsustainable nature of athletics spending. As Virginia Tech’s athletic director, Whit Babcock, put it to our Board of Visitors, it is expensive to win and expensive to lose.
The problem is, we don’t know how much money is enough, nor do we have a reliable way of evaluating the downside or the upside other than the immediate loss or gain of direct athletics revenue. It is clear that very few modern athletics programs can show a positive balance sheet without subsidies or fees, and that number is steadily decreasing. We invest because of the unquantified indirect benefits that appeal to our emotional need to be winners.
To me, this is a startlingly frank admission.
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Dr. Sands is a smart guy. He has a PhD in engineering, holds multiple patents, and is an established expert in nanotechnology. And here he is, admitting that he and his intellectually distinguished colleagues can’t properly measure the actual benefits that come from college athletics spending, and that they are in fact tied to budget increases for emotional, rather than practical, reasons.
He’s right! There’s no wishcasting that the Flutie Effect will magically justify all manner of athletic spending, especially since teams actually need to win in order to tap into that glorious (and highly temporary) philanthropy and application bump.
Selfishly, I’d note that schools typically don’t act like they want to get better data on “how much money is enough.” Virtually every athletic department is declining to share how they’re spending their House settlement money or how athlete compensation is working, and it requires pulling teeth (and thousands of dollars on my part) just to get schools to share their MFRS reports. Reporters and academics could study the relationships between spending, athletic success and a variety of athletic department KPIs, if only everybody would agree to disclose that data.
But alas, presidential leadership in that department seems to be lacking. In fact, even in this editorial, Dr. Sands bemoans a variety of legal and financial threats to the current model and states, “Wake me up when this is all over.”
My man, you don’t get to say that! You are in charge. I get to say "Wake me up when this is all over," because I am a man with a laptop who doesn’t actually get to vote on anything or make policy changes. You, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors, don’t get to throw up your hands. If you want to do that, quit and go work at Case Western Reserve or something.
Dr. Sands is correct in that there really is an awful lot that is outside of the hands of university presidents. They can lobby all they want, but they can’t force Congress to pass any sort of law, be that SCORE, or any other federal bill. They can’t organize athletes into a union and start collective bargaining for them. They can’t change what a judge says about future litigation.
But there are many things that are specifically in the control of current presidents. Dr. Sands points to several options, from signing the CSC participant agreement, introducing duration-of-eligibility rules, and using presidential influence to “wind down” collectives and entities meant to circumvent the House settlement caps.
Fundamentally though, he notes that conferences (and, I’m inferring here, schools),“…have more options if we are willing to stand up for the student-athlete model at the risk of introducing temporary competitive disadvantages.”
And given the emotional demands of winning, and the fuzzy math around everything else…well… I struggle to see how that’s possible.
After all, just last September, Virginia Tech approved a plan to add $229M to the athletic budget.
Maybe, with the right spreadsheets, we can figure out if that $229M will actually matter when it comes to wins, losses, ticket sales, and Directors Cup rankings. But “why you approved $229M when you don’t know the answer to any of those questions” is an emotional question that is beyond my area of expertise.
Or, it appears, Dr. Sands.
Here’s what else we wrote this week!
I caught up with the event organizers looking to bring high level college basketball to Croatia and Serbia. This won’t be easy, and the value prop is slightly different than bringing college football to Brazil or London.
We’ve gone another year with almost no mid-major upsets in the NCAA Tournaments. I think the answer is more complicated than just “the portal killed ‘em”
And we’ve added hundreds more documents to the Extra Points Library…and we’re oh so close from finishing our biggest product updates there EVER.
You can stay informed on everything we’re adding to Extra Points Library by signing up (for free) for the Library Card. I promise we won’t spam your inbox, this only comes out once or twice a month.
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Thanks for reading, everybody. I’ll see you on the internet.
