Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc.

How Big-Time College Sports Cheat Students, Taxpayers, and Academics

James Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000737011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. examines the corrupting influence and damaging financial effects of big-time intercollegiate athletics, especially football and to a lesser extent basketball, on American higher education.

Including historical and contemporary perspectives, the book traces the growth of intercollegiate sports from largely student-run activities supervised by faculty to the gargantuan, taxpayer-supported spectacles that now dominate many public universities. It investigates the regressive student fees that have helped subsidize big-time sports at public universities and prop up chronically unprofitable athletic departments, as well as the corrosive effects of athletics on the university's academic enterprise. A review of the alleged salutary effects of massive sports programs, such as spurring alumni donations and student applications, reveals that such benefits are largely illusory, more myth than real. The book also pays special attention to the often prescient, if largely unsuccessful, opponents of these developments, and considers the alternatives to big-time athletics, from abolition to professionalization to club sports.

Students, scholars, sports fans, and those interested in learning how big-time football and basketball have cast such an enormous—and often baleful—shadow upon American colleges and universities will profit from this provocative and engagingly written book.

1

INTRODUCTION

“American exceptionalism”—its meaning and even its very existence— has been the subject of considerable debate among historians and foreign policy analysts in these first years of the twenty-first century. But in one realm not even the most dedicated contrarian can dispute the existence of American exceptionalism, and that is big-time college sports. The essence of this exceptionalism in the context of athletics vis-à-vis academics is emphasized by the observation of legendary football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant at the University of Alabama that “Fifty thousand people don’t come to watch an English class.”¹ And, as Janice M. Beyer and David R. Hannah of the University of Texas at Austin—epicenter of the college athletics boom—write, “In no other country is college sports taken so seriously, given such large budgets, or so embedded within the structure of universities.”² Moreover, no other nation in the world has a university system that functions as a minor league for professional sports—or as, in a sense, a professional league itself.

We live in a sports-mad country. A whopping 85 percent of American males go first to the sports pages when opening a newspaper.³ (Of course, this statistic was discovered back in that antediluvian era before the newspaper was so thoroughly routed by online news.) That college athletics have become big business is a truism. In 2012, ESPN agreed to pay $7.3 billion for the rights to broadcast the next 12 years of the football Bowl Championship Series.⁴ In 2016, CBS and the Turner networks extended their deal to broadcast the NCAA men’s basketball tournament—“March Madness”—through the year 2032 at a rate of about $1.1 billion per year.⁵ For each game a team plays in the men’s tournament, its conference receives about $1.7 million, which is then divided among member schools. In defense of this state of affairs, Syracuse University’s then-chancellor Kenneth A. “Buzz” Shaw told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003:

I have yet to see the networks pick up on the national competition for drama programs. It isn’t that we’re overemphasizing sports. It’s that people like it, they watch it, and the NCAA and the networks give them what they want.⁶

March Madness has come a long way—or has it gone in the wrong direction?—from humble beginnings. The first NCAA basketball tournament in 1939 featured eight teams. The Oregon Webfoots (later Ducks) beat Ohio State in Evanston, Illinois, on the campus of Northwestern, for the title, though the National Invitational Tournament (NIT), founded in 1938 and centered around Madison Square Garden in Manhattan (New York, that is, not Kansas), was a bigger deal. The NCAA tournament eclipsed the NIT by the mid to late 1950s, and in 2005 the NCAA actually purchased the NIT, which has settled into its middling condition as a not terribly attractive consolation prize for teams not invited to the 68-team NCAA tournament. (It’s really no fun shouting “We’re Number 69!” when your team brings home the NIT title.)

Before we trip over these letter-clots, a word on acronyms and the groups they denote is in order: The largest association of schools fielding intercollegiate athletic teams is the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, which in 2017 had 1,123 members separated into three divisions. (College athletic officials are as hierarchy-obsessed as any ambitious arriviste.) In 1922, Fielding Yost, then athletic director at the University of Michigan, urged the NCAA convention to divide its membership according to each school’s “attitude toward athletics.”⁷ But not until 1956–7, when the NCAA created College and University Divisions for the purpose of holding tournaments, was there a fissioning based on attitude toward athletics. In 1968–9, 223 schools chose to compete in the upper-level University Division, while 386 were lodged in the College Division.⁸ In 1973 the bipartite arrangement became tripartite, with schools choosing to compete in Divisions I, II, or III. This trisection was based less on size than on athletic philosophy, particularly with respect to athletic scholarships. Five years later, spurred by the threat of an alliance of big-time football programs calling itself the College Football Association (CFA), the NCAA separated the Division I wheat from chaff, or powerhouses from pretenders, by creating a Division I-A and Division I-AA. In 2007, to spread nomenclatorial murk if nothing else, Division I-A became the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and Division I-AA was renamed the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS).

Today, Division I, which offers full scholarships or grants-in aid, has about 350 members; Division II, which offers partial scholarships, has about 300 members; and Division III, with about 450 member schools, does not offer athletic scholarships and is often, though not unanimously, held up as the repository of old-fashioned “play for the love of the game” purity.

Within NCAA Division I, 130 schools are members of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), whose season culminates in the Bowl Championship Series—the famed national championship fought over by the Alabamas and Ohio States, the Michigans and Clemsons. (The FBS schools include about 25 percent of the nation’s college students.)⁹ The FBS has minimum attendance levels, among other requirements. Schools competing in the Football Bowl Subdivision must sponsor a minimum of 16 teams (with a minimum of eight being all-female squads), have an average home attendance of at least 15,000 over a rolling two-year period (the methods of counting are, ah, flexible), provide a minimum of 90 percent of the available football scholarships over a two-year rolling period, and schedule at least five home games a year against FBS opponents.¹⁰ Another 125 schools compete in the second-tier Football Championship Series. The remaining Division I schools do not field football teams. These are, disproportionately, Catholic basketball powers and quondam powers: Gonzaga, Providence, St. Bonaventure, and the like.

Much less prominent than the NCAA is the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, or NAIA. The NAIA grew out of a 1937 basketball tournament for smaller schools under the grandfatherly eye of Dr. James Naismith, inventor of the game. Midwestern in flavor, it was formalized in 1940 as the National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball before adopting its current name in 1952. It consists today of about 250 small colleges and universities whose 65,000 athletes compete in baseball, basketball, bowling, cheerleading and dance, cross country, football, golf, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, volleyball, and wrestling.¹¹ Membership took a hit when in 1973 the NCAA carved itself into three segments; many of the then-561 NAIA schools defected to the larger and wealthier organization.¹² It has contracted in recent decades, but it endures. The National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA), founded in 1938, has 525 members in three divisions. The NAIA and NJCAA are peripheral to the concerns of this book, though the pernicious effect of athletics on academics is visible in those schools, too.

American colleges and universities award about $2.9 billion annually in full and partial scholarships to over 150,000 athletes at the Division I and II levels. These are not handed out promiscuously, or to every rag-armed pitcher or brick-laying forward: only about 2 percent of high school athletes receive such aid.¹³

In the case of football and basketball, and to a lesser extent hockey, big-time college athletic programs act as farm systems for professional leagues. Promising, if callow, players are given first-tier training, deluxe (compared with their fellow “students”) accommodations, and compete before large crowds, winning laurels of various stripes. They are also offered—as long as it doesn’t interfere too much with their athletic obligations—a four-year education and a bachelor’s degree. The best—1.1 percent of Division I men’s basketball players, 1.6 percent of NCAA football players—will appear, at least briefly, in the National Basketball Association or the National Football League.¹⁴

Division I coaches are typically the highest paid people at the university, and at public universities, they may be the highest paid government employees in the state. Remarkably, the highest-paid public employee in 39 of the 50 states is a college football or men’s basketball coach. The eleven exceptions are Alaska (whose best-compensated public employee is president of the state’s Gasline Development Corporation), Delaware (public school superintendent), Hawaii (neurosurgeon), Maine (University of Maine chancellor), Montana (commissioner of higher education), Nevada (aptly, a plastic surgeon at the University of Nevada—alas, he died as this was being written), New Hampshire (president of the University of New Hampshire), New York (CEO of SUNY Stony Brook Hospital), North Dakota (dean of the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences), South Dakota (dean of the University of South Dakota School of Medicine), and Vermont (dean of the University of Vermont’s College of Medicine). The salaries of these eleven never top $1 million, in contrast to the salaries of the coaches, which in a majority of cases are well over the $1 million mark.¹⁵

Despite appearances, American universities do spend more on books than on balls. Or, more pertinently in this day and age, smart boards and new technology buildings. Athletic operating expenditures as a percentage of total institutional expenditure is about 5.6 percent for FBS schools, 7.0 for FCS schools, and 6.0 for schools with Division I basketball but no football.¹⁶

Yet despite all this money being thrown around as so much legal tender confetti, only a handful—between five and 25, depending on the year and the source—of the approximately 350 Division I athletic programs have revenues that exceed expenses. These schools are, inevitably, drawn from the “Power Five” conferences whose teams occupy a privileged position in the football Bowl Championship Series. In the most recent accounting, only 23 Division I public universities of the 230 Division I public university athletic departments finished in the black, by NCAA accounting standards.¹⁷ (This book focuses primarily on public, taxpayer-supported schools.)

As discussed in Chapter 4, most athletic departments rely on student fees extracted from a student body that is somewhere between unaware and resentful of this regressive transfer of wealth from often hard-pressed undergraduates to gold-plated football programs. The scholarly consensus, based on empirical evidence, was stated plainly in a 2013 report by the Delta Cost Project of the American Institute for Research:

The belief that college sports are a financial boon to colleges and universities is generally misguided. Although some big-time college sports athletic departments are self-supporting—and some sports may be profitable enough to help support other campus sports programs—more often than not, the colleges and universities are subsidizing athletics, not the other way around.¹⁸

Nevertheless, the myth endures: a Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics poll found that 78 percent of Americans believe that college sports turn a profit for their schools.¹⁹

For every University of Texas at Austin, flush with television and ticket and donor revenue, there are five University of Texas at El Pasos or San Antonios or Texas States, which survive in part by beggaring students through mandatory fees—sometimes in the thousands of dollars per student annually. And even the UTs of the world have to answer, or sedulously avoid, the question of whether their pursuit of athletic riches and glory is consistent with the putative academic mission of the university.

The athletes—the term student-athlete is, at the Division I level, a faintly ridiculous euphemism, a “legalistic confectio[n] propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. From brutal gentlemen amateurs to “student-athletes” on the payroll: The development of intercollegiate sports
• 3. Stopping football in its tracks—or getting run over
• 4. Athletic fees rout hapless students: The college sports scandal that never makes the headlines
• 5. Money changes everything
• 6. Athletics: The best boost academics ever had?
• 7. “A game for every girl and a girl for every game”? A brief look at how women’s sports lost their virtue and became carbon copies of the male game
• 8. Reform—or renewal?
• Index