That is why I think only the top producing colleges would form their own collective. My number of 60 is probably too high. Alabama, Tennessee, USC, Michigan, Ohio State, etc., yes. Vanderbilt, Georgia Tech, Rutgers, BC, not so much. Don’t even think about FCS (formerly 1-AA) schools.
This has been done before, at least for TV rights. IIRC, back in the late 80s, college football created the CFA in dealing with TV rights. Did so-so. Then the SEC broke away and brokered their own deal with CBS and boom. How college football was watched changed and how schools/conferences got paid changed.
NIL is how these kids will be paid on top of some baseline structure beyond room and board. It will probably similar to minor league baseball and hockey.
The table I posted a link to a few months ago only showed 18 universities that actually cover the cost of their athletic programs. U of M was one of them. Michigan State was not, in spite of all the corruption and scandals in State’s athletics program.
Second point, “collective” sounds Communistical. We don’t do Communistical in Shiny-land. Call it a monopolistic cabal. That sounds appropriately Shiny.
Steve
I think this vastly oversimplifies the economic incentives at play here.
The economic purpose of a top-tier collegiate football team is not to produce revenue for the school. The economic purpose of that football team is to produce great feelings and connections among alumni and other voters who will achieve relative status and prominence in the community, and especially among those alumni who direct the state budgeting process and/or write endowment checks (for the handful of private universities with big football programs).
High profile athletic programs aren’t money-makers. They’re an expensive form of signaling. They signal to prospective students that the university offers more than just an academic environment (which you could get from online courses, TBH). They signal to alumni that the university is a relevant institution in their lives after graduation. They create “fans” among not just alumni but voters at large, so that when budgeting comes up there’s a ton of people who care about MSU even if they never went.
The below article is old, but I’m sure it’s still true - back in 2011, about 1/3 of Michigan state legislators had attended either U of M or MSU. I’m sure that you’d see similar proportions among other elected officials that are the “feeders” into those state legislator jobs, and among the lobbyists and campaign donors that make all those local campaigns possible. That’s more valuable to those universities than any amount of revenue they could get from their athletic programs.
One of the most important things that a modern university has an economic incentive to produce is prestige. Not just in the most limited sense of the regard that their academic research or programs are held in - but in the broadest possible sense, of communicating to countless people across the state and the country (or the world) that their institution is an important and valuable one.
They want talented students to want to attend; they want talented professors and researchers to join their faculty; they want employers to want their students on graduation; they want other institutions to want to collaborate with them; they want their communities to think they’re important; they want their state regulators and financiers to think they’re significant and valuable; and they want alumni to continue to invest resources (time, money, political influence) into making the university stronger. If someone walks into a room - any room - where their university affiliation might be important, they want their school to be recognized.
All of that stuff is important for an institution like a university, which is a very different creature than many other type of organizations. It’s not just important for the “old boys,” either - it’s very important for their students and alumni and faculty, and the state at large (since almost all top-flight college football programs are at public schools, not private ones). A public university is a communal effort, an ongoing one that last for decades and centuries. For the endeavor to retain value, you need to cultivate a vast amount of participation across a wide swatch of stakeholders.
Athletics - especially spectator sports like football - might seem tangential to the university’s mission. But they are often the crucible in which long-lasting connections to the university are formed (both among those attending the university and those who never have), and a signaling device to alumni and the broader community to pay attention to the university. In a competition for scarce public resources, that’s critical to the interests not just of the “old boys,” but those who fulfill the core functions of the university - the students and faculty who defend heavily on public support from taxpayers for a public university to exist in the first place.
albaby1, you are really, really, stretching. To shorten your post, “athletics are more important than academics”. Not if Shiny-land wants to maintain it’s position in the world. If the economy is build around oversize morons crashing into each-other, the innovators, and the builders, are going to be elsewhere.
I remember sitting in High School, when TPTB start carrying on “we are playing Portage Northern Friday. They are our big rival, so we need to beat them”. I’m thinking “who says?” “why?” “so what?” “who cares?” But questions were not welcome, only conformity.
Not true. If I were to shorten my post, it would be “a university’s brand is really, really valuable - and athletics help the brand immensely.”
That’s not more important than academics. It’s not even something unrelated to academics. A university’s brand helps it get the resources it needs for good academics. You want students and faculty to want to be there. You want legislators to want to fund you. You want people around the country to have heard of your school so they hire your graduates (which helps you get good students going forward). Etc.
When most of your budget for your academics comes from state legislators (or donations to the endowment for private schools), your academics benefit enormously from those state legislators caring deeply about the welfare of your school. College athletics is an important asset for that.
Sounds like you missed out on a fun high school experience. There’s a reason why “the Big Game against Longtime Rival” is a trope of so many educational experiences - because the Big Game fosters connections to the institution that are important to the institution. It doesn’t matter how much money you make from ticket sales for the Local High School v. Northern Portage game - what matters is that you get people invested in Local High School. The same dynamic carries forward if you’re talking about the Harvard-Yale games or the national college championships.
Granted, there will be those who will reject that. In an effort to avoid “conformity,” they’ll eschew participating. But most folks will get engaged, and it benefits the institution.
This seems to be a uniquely American thing. There are lots of universities in the UK and Canada that don’t have nearly the same emphasis on athletics, and they are well regarded.
It is not the school, per se. It is the society in which the school is located (physically AND psychologically) that wants/demands it. If a university has a long-established XYZ dept that is widely recognized as being outstanding, then they may not “need” athletics–and may eschew it as a result. But for a more generalized institution of education, athletics can be a focal point to bring together those smaller diverse groups into a single larger group with a stronger/better empathy for the school (i.e. creating a unifying “brand”, as Albaby stated above). Why? Because athletics is something the other groups do NOT do, so it is an outside-yet-inside part of the institution (like it or not) that represents them.
I don’t doubt the majority of athletic programs loose money. For the majority, football winds up paying for all if not most of the rest of the sports. For example, couple weeks ago, Tennessee hosted U Conn for their homecoming football game. This was not a home and home scenario. Purely, you come here, we pay you, usually kick your tail, you go home with money. U Conn left with a tail whipping (59-3) but also a $1.8M check. Do that 4-5 times a year and you’ve put over $7-9M into your athletic budget. Pays for a lot of loosing events like tennis, field hockey, diving, etc., etc., etc. Now, if the football program got to keep ALL the money, I would lay odds that many football programs would pay for themselves.
Now, put all the big programs into one collective/conference/insert favorite capitalistic phrase here, TV revenue would increase. Why? Who wants to watch, much less pay for TV rights, Big State U play Sweet Sisters of the Blind 4 times a year? No one. But pair up Big State U with U of Big State and other big name teams every week, you will have millions of eyeballs watching.
That is where I think collage football is headed. And keeping the money for themselves.
I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but this basically just plays into Steve’s argument. Even if the football program makes money, the money just flows into other sports–not academics.
Do students attend MIT because of the football team? The Engineers play in NCAA division 3. Their stadium seats all of 1000. Many high school stadiums are bigger than that.
Do students attend Cal Tech because of the football team? Cal Tech shuttered it’s football program 30 years ago.
GM CEO Mary Barra graduated from GMI (from the days when General Motors was so vertically integrated it developed it’s own cadre of engineers), now known as Kettering University. Kettering had no varsity athletic program.
People compete for spots in those institutions because of their record of academic excellence. Where do you want the “leaders and statesmen” to be developed? In an institution with a reputation for excellence, or a reputation for corralling a herd of overgrown morons to crash into each-other?
Teaching kids to hate the kids at another school, because their parents happened to settle in a different neighborhood? This is not only wasteful, it’s stupid.
Yeah, this is a really good look for what are supposed to be institutions of learning.
/sarcasm
Some schools - especially small specialized private schools - might not have the need or resources to have intercollegiate athletic programs. And there are some excellent schools that do. Because intercollegiate athletics is fun and builds connections to the institution. The Harvard-Yale game, for example, is a rallying point for both institutions - students all come together, alumni come back to campus - even though no one outside of that world really cares about it and there’s very little direct revenue to the schools from the Game. And that’s why these schools do it - because it’s valuable for the schools in ways that have little to do with ticket sale dollars.
No - it’s teaching kids to like their school. Again - it’s fun. You dress up in your school merch, you make plans with friends around the big rivalry game, you do silly cheers and taunts of Rival U., you get filled up with identification around your school. Whether it’s between big-time programs, like Alabama-Auburn, or between programs that have absolutely no impact on the national stage, like Army-Navy or Harvard-Yale or Lafayette-Lehigh. There aren’t a lot of activities that the entire student body and faculty and alumni can and do participate in at once; apart from graduation, a big rivalry game is one of the few.
You want your students and faculty and alumni to think of your college as someplace more than just a place where people trade dollars for classroom instruction and nothing else. You want them to regard it as an institution they belong to, to be part of their identity. You kind of want them to also enjoy it. Intercollegiate athletics have become an important tool for doing all that.
Do your own survey. Next time you see someone parading around in some university colors, or holding forth on how great their football team is, ask them if they actually graduated from that school. I’m retired now, so don’t have access to a population of coworkers. But when I was working, there were some devoted U of M fans around, who, I am almost certain, never graduated from any college, let alone U of M.