> Why can't the American football industry run itself more like the American baseball industry?

I am a very strong opponent of the overwhelming sports culture at American universities, and of the absurd sums of money spent to sustain it. (Example: Dabo Swinney was just given a $93 million contract to remain the football coach of Clemson.)

This

>Defenders of the current system will often claim that football is profitable for universities and provides funding for academics

is part of the reason. But the real argument is: successful football programs generate positive publicity for the school; they encourage more strong high school students to apply for admission; they encourage alumni to open their pocketbooks and donate.

Personally, as a professor at an American university, I don't buy it. But evidently my bosses do.

I don't mind the strong sports culture. College football has an immense history dating back to the late 1800s as an organized national collegiate activity. I'm a fan and I enjoy the history and pageantry of the sport. Athletic departments are self-funded by donations, TV rights, ticket sales, and merchandise, and they take no money that would otherwise be allocated to academics. They also can increase the brand of a university, as you pointed out.

I take issue with a couple things: First is that unpaid 'workers' are responsible for driving an industry now worth billions of dollars. Second is that some scholarship athletes are admitted to schools they have no business attending on academic merit, and end up in essentially remedial education. This is true even at prestigious schools with high-level academics.

"Athletic departments are self-funded by donations, TV rights, ticket sales, and merchandise, and they take no money that would otherwise be allocated to academics"

That is absolutely not true. At least $300 a semester of my tuition went to our sports programs. And I went to a public university in the US. We don't even have that prestigious a football team. I can't imagine how much students pay at schools like Alabama.

Big football programs make big money, small programs don't.

For the 2012-2013 season University of Texas brought in over $100 million with under $30 million in expenses. Same year Alabama brought in $88 million on $47 mil in expenses.

edit: The magnitude of these numbers is why I think these teams and perhaps a 4-year league should be spun off and the players should be paid.

-https://smartycents.com/articles/college-football-revenue/

> immense history dating back to the late 1800s

It's such an american thing to say that something just over a hundred years old has immense history. I own furniture and other stuff, which my grandparents inherited, that is probably older than that.

Sure the stuff has some history, but it's barely a few generations.

I got an MBA from a fairly small private university. Speaking to the head of admissions he only wished the school had a D1 football team so that more people had heard of it.

There is a strong history of associating the identity of the school with its football program (though I expect this to wane as we learn more about the long-term impact of concussions). Let’s take Ohio State as an example: it is more compelling of a mid tier graduate program because of its success on the football field.

I don’t say that as a knock on OSU: they have fine academics. But being a Buckeye is very connected to the football team.

Same with Alabama. I currently live in Birmingham and when I relocated I was asked all the time, “whose your team?” That question only has two acceptable answers: Auburn or Alabama. There is no option for “none of the above.”

But I still expect this to wane given a long enough horizon. From a sample of one, I used to be very involved in college football and NFL fantasy football leagues. But over the last five years I’ve become less comfortable with the sport (it feels like watching a Roman gladiator match). I’m [edit: bearish] on the 15 year horizon for the sport: I think we’ve reached peak football.

> they encourage more strong high school students to apply for admission

By encouraging more students to apply, they have the opportunity to turn down more applicants and appear more selective, boosting their position in college rankings.

The whole thing is ridiculous. We are supposed to be educating students, not giving them brain damage.

> successful football programs generate positive publicity for the school

Maybe for lower tier colleges, but I sincerely doubt that anyone gives a rodents behind how the football teams of Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, CalTech and others top-tier Universities are, before applying to them.

To my surprise I have heard, of Princeton in particular, that football is very important to alumni. When I visited, there was certainly no shortage of athletic swag sold across the street from campus.

They are in the Ivy League, which means they don't give out athletic scholarships. They would be crushed by any D1 team. And, yet, the alumni (many of whom are deep-pocketed) care.

Sure, the alumni care as it probably gives them something to root for and bond them. But, I'm sure the applying students don't care, which was my point.

Apparently even Caltech has been sanctioned for violating NCAA rules.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.si.com/college-basketball/2...

Those sanctions were widely ridiculed in the sports press.

Briefly, it is not uncommon at Caltech for students who have two or three possible electives that would fit into one open slot in the schedule to not register for any of them at the start of the term, and sit in on all of them and do the homework for all of them for two or three weeks, and then decide which to take. They then register for that one.

This practice is approved by the faculty and administration.

Caltech had just gotten a new head of athletics, and while reviewing student records he realized that (1) several students on Caltech teams had done this "try before registering" thing, (2) for those two or three weeks, before they picked and registered for one of those courses, they were technically, by NCAA rules, part time students, not full time students, and (3) they had attended team practice sessions during that time.

It's against NCAA rules to allow part time students on a team, including team practices. The new head of athletics reported Caltech's inadvertent violation of this rule to the NCAA, and also reported that all student athletes were properly full time before participating in any games, and that they would make sure in the future to not allow students to join the team until they had registered for a full load.

The NCAA response was to put more severe sanctions on Caltech than they had put on major athletic schools that had committed massive rules violations, such as fake classes and grades to keep players from becoming ineligible for low grades, bribes, and the like.

The sports press take on this was generally it was more evidence that the NCAA is incompetent and/or corrupt. The NCAA had been criticized for slaps on the wrists against those big schools with big money sports programs, so many thought that they came down hard on Caltech to try to look like they could be tough without the downside of damaging one of the big money making athletic programs.

Northwestern is a pretty good school, but apparently its sudden appearance in bowl games years ago did boost the applications.

Is it really still profitable in e.g. that case of Dabo Swinney landing a 93 million dollar contract?

The places where the profitability of football is in question is basically everything lower than the 5 main conferences (Big 10, SEC, ACC, Big XII, and Pac 10), and especially the schools lower than that level which aren't reliable winners. (Think the San Jose State's of the world)

Clemson football generated 50 million dollars last year

https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/sports/college/clemso...

While 93 million over 10 years works out to being a pretty sizable chunk of that for one employee,

yeah, its still a profitable enterprise

It's profitable only because the players aren't paid. Only a small percentage of the players make it to the NFL. Many of the remainder suffer physical consequences for the rest of their lives. It's one of the most obscene exploitation schemes still remaining.

> It's profitable only because the players aren't paid.

No.

The NFL minimum salary is under $500k and by your own admission these players aren't that good.

Even a generous $200k/yr and a generous 100 player roster only adds up to $20 million, and there are teams with over $50 million in profits.

First, there are not many teams with over $50 million in profits, only the top 13 as of 2018. [0]

Second, you're assuming that even the top players would only make the minimum, which you have arbitrarily set at $200k, assuming that they would be paid less than the minimum NFL salary. The more accurate measure would be to pay them some percentage of the average NFL salary, which was $1.9 million in 2018. [1] So assuming the average college player salary would be 40% (to use your arbitrary number), that would be just under $800k per player. Even with a 53-player roster, that puts player salaries at over $40 million annually, which wipes out profits for all but the top 15 or 20 teams.

Third, I didn't say these players "aren't that good." The fact that only 2% of them make it to the NFL doesn't mean the other 98% aren't that good, it just means that the market won't bear paying for more players when they're fairly compensated.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2018/09/11/college-f...

[1] https://gazettereview.com/2017/03/average-nfl-player-salary/

The average college football player, with their 2% chance of making it to the NFL, is worth the median NFL salary of roughly $800k? This has gone a little too far off track for me.

The core issue here is claiming that profits are derived from not paying players. There are plenty of teams not paying players and losing money. The top teams could pay players well and still make profit. There's a small Goldilocks zone where what players should be paid lines up with the team's level of profit. The old "profits come from not paying workers" canard is a story with little to no explanatory power here.

that's nothing against the european hooligan scene, who meet to literally bash each other's heads in, in the extreme cases. While the societal affiliations hardly compare, the disparity is the same.

If you lose, it's your fault, but if you win, then we win. It's symptomatic, whether with burned out programmers, upto and over 50% of university drop-outs (in certain programs like maths or physics at least), blue collar workers who break their backs, etc. etc.

University athletic departments have to compete with NFL salaries in much the same way that university CS departments have to compete with FAANG salaries.

Clemson's football program has been exceptional under Dabo. I can see how his 10-year contract is justified.

The top college football programs pull in over a hundred million in revenue each year. Clemson is on it's way there. And that's only in media, ticket sales and such. I'm sure schools with excellent football programs are more likely to attract students and alumni donations.

Check out this WSJ table with revenues from the 2018 season. https://graphics.wsj.com/table/NCAA_2019?mod=article_inline

EDIT: Thinking more about it—there are secondary effects as well. If a team does well, it attracts fans from out of town. Those fans will spend money on food, drinks, entertainment and hotels. That provides local businesses money and the city tax revenues.

Clemson pulls in about $50M / year from football alone, not counting any tangentially related revenue it may generate.

Athletic departments don't necessarily have a need to be profitable, and most are not. Clemson averages ~$77 million in revenue over the last few years, mostly from valuable TV rights and ticket sales.

If investing in the sports really brought the university more revenue than otherwise, I wouldn't mind, so long as that money went to things like research and lowered tuition, which I know it unfortunately likely wouldn't.

I don’t mind the strong sports cultural. I’d rather people find an outlet for their in build tribal tendencies through sports than something more destructive like race or politics.

You don't buy it? But here we are... two total strangers with (presumably) no relationship to the University of Alabama, discussing the University of Alabama because of their football program that got their university into the New York Times and onto the homepage of Hacker News.

I guess we can debate whether "positive" equals "positive sentiment" or "positive success in generating brand awareness." However, the fact that this article exists underscores the positive publicity value of the Alabama football program regardless of whether this specific article is good or bad publicity.

In other words, the NYT never writes this article for Sheboygan State University's football program because not enough people care about it (note: it doesn't exist... nor does Sheboygan State... it's just a generic example so I wouldn't offend anyone with the name of a real university).

In contrast, people care about the University of Alabama's football program, which results in people caring about the University of Alabama.

Could’ve used an NYC Manhattan school for NYT not writing about their sports program. I doubt any of them have one :)

>it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy

Sports are part of a traditional old-school liberal arts education. That is why the Ivy League schools have some of the largest athletic departments in the country even though they don't generate revenue anywhere close to schools like Alabama or Ohio State. It is really no different than a school having a music or a theater program. Alabama just so happens to be the Juilliard of football. There are certainly some schools that shouldn't be spending what they do on their athletic department, but the idea that they need to generate a profit is just as flawed as expecting a public school's theater department to turn a profit. That said, there is no question that Alabama makes a solid profit on their football team.

Also the baseball industry is run differently because minor league baseball exists. There is not much of a minor league system in either basketball or football that provides a well defined development path for high school athletes. Both the NBA, NFL, and various independent organizations have tried developing them over the years, but college athletics is still the primary route for all American born professional basketball and football players. Universities and the NCAA are just taking advantage of that market need for minor league sports.

> Sports are part of a traditional old-school liberal arts education.

A traditional, old-school liberal arts education consists of exactly the seven liberal arts, divided into the trivium ([Latin] grammar, logic, and rhetoric) followed by the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, theory of music, and astronomy.)

The slightly less old-school version takes the old trivium deemphasizes formal logic, and adds Greek, history, moral philosophy, and poetry.

I should have been more specific. I was not referring to a European or Renaissance idea of Liberal Arts, but more the 19th century US version that was used as the basis for a large number of American universities especially in the Northeast. Athletics and fitness played a central part in the educational experience there. Once again, that is why Ivy League schools generally have athletics departments that rank among the largest in the nation in terms of number of participants.

We let students major in theater, but not in football. There's a big difference.

> We let students major in theater, but not in football.

Well, we usually don't call it “football” specifically, but “exercise science” or something similar is commonly available. And Baylor has “general studies”, which despite the generic name is intended to support “general career areas of health, fitness, recreation, and sport”, and that's what most of their football players major in.

I’ll also throw out that when I played (D3) football in college, the intellectual load of the sport was higher than in some of my academic classes. We’d spend an hour a day studying film, and on the field we were expected to know understand how our actions would effect multiple other parties in a system.

I still think I got more (intellectually) out of college level football than I did out of intro level sociology.

Given the presumably-larger number of hours I figure you put into football vs. into intro sociology, that hardly seems surprising.

Do you have to be on a team for those majors? Or does it count towards them? If not, I'd say that's still not the same.

> Do you have to be on a team for those majors? Or does it count towards them?

Varsity sports provides letter-graded credits in “classes” available only to student athletes at many colleges and universities, and those credits are generally applicable to general ed requirements for any major to whatever limits generally apply to PE credits, and to major requirements in some related majors, yes.

In fact, Alabama football team members spend far more time doing football-related things — practices, meetings, games, etc. — than any non-athlete devotes to their major subject.

Isn't that more a function of competition than necessity, though? Players who don't put in that time will be benched or cut from the team.

Regardless, I wouldn't exactly call that a virtue. The team members are dumping intense amounts of time into something (while risking literal brain damage) for a tiny chance at a place on an NFL team. Most of those players will leave the university and spend the rest of their lives not making a cent from their sport.

Not saying it's unreasonable to devote time to your passion, without expectation of monetary reward, and if football happens to be it, that's cool. But a university is a place to educate oneself, and it seems a bit sad to me to spend the majority of one's time there not actually doing that, especially when the actual use of time is unlikely to help much for their future outside of school.

Don't get me wrong, I was a varsity student athlete too, but none of that counted towards my major. I think it would be a joke if it had counted as academic work. I went to college to learn and play, separately.

Surely only 20 hours a week, or 8 in the off-season, according to NCAA rules.

Players on Big 5 conference teams spend the night before games in an secure hotel, both at home and on the road. That equals at least 24 hours and in the case of night games perhaps 30 hours devoted to football on game weekends every week during the season.

Add to that travel time to distant cities for road games plus practice and you're closer to averaging 60 hours/week.

Many players practice together unofficially as well both in and out of season.

this is extremely misinformed. there are phisical education and phisical therapy degrees, team sport is essential to character development in children and sport in general done early and constantly is useful to combat a wealth of health related issues including obesity.

sport in school is not an USA anomaly, in Italy the school curriculum basically includes for all obligatory cycles as much hours of physical activity as there are arts and culture hours every week.

the USA anomaly is making a business out of it, but that's just them.

Do you have any evidence to back your assertion that team sport is necessary for childhood character development? How about your implied premise that team sport does a better job of improving physical health than individual sport or non-competive physical activity?

it's self evident if you ever been trough schooling, but since you want to play the evidence game let's start from a systemic study about team sport, socialization and psychological health

https://ijbnpa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1479-5868-...

If I thought the premise was self-evident, I would not have wasted my time challenging you. The review you cited covers effects of participation in team sport on physical well-being and certain markers of psychological well-being, but you claimed that sport builds character.

Perhaps I assumed a different meaning from the one you intended, but when I hear people going on about sport building character, they're usually talking about their idea of "moral character".

This study does not test, let alone support, the premise that sport builds moral character. Did you mean some other kind of character?

social skills, empathy and understanding rules in social context. I've no idea how morality got into this.

You dragged morality into this when you talked about "character" instead of saying exactly what you meant. :)

Yet football players tend to make more money and find jobs around the sport more often than theater students do in and around the theater.

When you factor in the extremely small percentage of aspiring football players that will actually make it big, coupled with the now extremely clear effects of CTE... I openly ponder: What dollar figure would you require to willingly participate in a repetitive action that is known to cause long term brain damage (and essentially, brain death given CTE)?

Yeah, you might have a better quality of life (money wise) temporarily, but I would argue the horribleness one with CTE experiences at the end of their life outweighs that temporary benefit.

A quick search states about 2% of college football players manage to go pro.

I'm not familiar, but I imagine it's a bit of a cliff for the other 98%? There don't seem to be too many transferable skills from college football if you don't make a living from football.

> I'm not familiar, but I imagine it's a bit of a cliff for the other 98%? There don't seem to be too many transferable skills from college football if you don't make a living from football.

I think football players tend very often to take academic programs relating to communication/journalism, education, or PE/exercise science/etc., and there are certainly some transferable skills from college football itself, along with such programs, to sports journalism, coaching/athletic training, and teaching in secondary school PE programs.

Is there a study or something that backs up your assertion?

Is that true? Do you mean all football players including walk ons?

I think we will look back on this period of American universities (between say the 1980s and whenever the NFL gets a basic minor league) as a great aberration. College sports were meant to be clubs of enthusiasts from the student body, not a parallel big business.

Maybe as an intermediate step, you could have schools that sponsor the teams and offer scholarships for when the players leave professional sports. That would be nice for the players involved because they would be a bit older and better able to take advantage of their studies.

> I think we will look back on this period of American universities as a great aberration.

I hope so. Athletics are only the tip of the iceberg.

Tuition at universities like Harvard, Princeton, etc. runs around $45,000 a year. Even at public universities, it tends to be over $10,000 a year. This is tuition, mind you, not counting room and board. These figures are vastly higher than a generation ago, and are continuing to skyrocket. Needless to say, this is inflicting crippling debt on huge numbers of college students.

Meanwhile, universities are hiring fewer and fewer tenure-track professors; increasingly, the teaching is being done by people working under terrible job conditions. See, for example, this as an example:

https://pankisseskafka.com/2017/07/16/rate-my-jil-2018-this-...

I am an insider -- a college professor at an American university. The current system is thoroughly screwed. We need a big reset.

Tuition rates for Harvard and Princeton in particular are deceptive since if you earnestly cannot afford that tuition, they don't ask you to pay it. Those schools are often actually cheaper than public schools for people without much money.

Other expensive private-nonprofit schools may be another matter entirely. But those two are bad examples to use.

> Those schools are often actually cheaper than public schools for people without much money.

While this is true on paper, it's not always the case in practice. I was able to get multiple acceptance offers to Ivy League schools, and poor enough to have the sliding scale of tuition slide all the way to $0. But all of them had an estimated cost of attendance[1] so optimistic about ancillary expenses during the school year that it was infeasible to actually go to any of them. There were other implicit barriers to acceptance as a poor kid as well, but the way the sliding scale was implemented was the biggest.

I chose a state school instead. Despite a higher paper cost higher than the Ivy League schools offering free tuition, the total out of pocket cost for attendance of the state school worked out significantly lower.

[1] Federal loans and many scholarships won't pay out over the university's estimated cost of attendance. By zero'ing out tuition and room and board, that just leaves the "books and personal expenses" line item,

I'm a little surprised by your story. I was in a similar situation myself, except that I chose to go to an Ivy League school, and there were sufficiently many work-study options available to help pay for all my expenses.

For sure! You can see my replies to sibling comments, but those opportunities exist. I just was too naive at the time and without sufficient personal support to be able to understand that. And while some of the acceptance offers made reference to things such as work study, there was a presumption of understanding in many of them on how that stuff works. And I was a first generation college student without anyone to help me fill in that knowledge gap.

There were additional issues like the logistics and upfront costs of a cross-country move, as well as the timing of aid disbursements and expense needs. Which I neither had the savings nor the cashflow to confidently support, nor anyone to lean on temporarily for it. While there were plenty of unknowns for the state school, they were manageable enough for me to be competent in my ability to handle them and close enough to my personal support network if things went south.

Many schools do in fact have the ability to address such needs. I just didn't learn was a possibility until after the fact. For anyone else that happens to be in that situation, I'd strongly encourage doing what you did and taking the Ivy offer. There will be sufficient support to accomodate your circumstances. It'd just be nice if the schools themselves improved their offer letters or follow-up collateral to address the concerns/needs that are likely for those which qualify for a zero'd out tuition or whose application/FAFSA documents indicate are a first generation college student.

Ancillary expenses make college hard to attend, but that's not because the school is ripping you off, it's because life is expensive. The absolute cheapest housing in Cambridge, MA is in the middle of downtown on Harvard's campus.

I don't disagree. But the cost of attendance includes a line item for "personal expenses" (which includes books and all that stuff). For 2019-2020 academic year at Harvard, that line item is $4,193[1]. There's also a line item for "travel expenses", but when using their net price calculator with my circumstances when I went to school, that kept coming back as zero.

By zero'ing out tuition, fees, and room and board, that leaves $4,193 as the cap on demonstrable need, which federal loans and many scholarships will use as a max limit on cumulative aid. This is unrealistically optimistic, and serves to needlessly cap the potential ability to raise funds via merit scholarships or loans, shifting part of the cost burden to ongoing cashflow.

Which, I'll concede, isn't necessarily too hard due to the plethora of work-study and student jobs available. But I only knew that after the fact, and the prospect of getting stuck far away from home without the money to make ends meet and the knowledge that your family is too far away to help you get home and too poor to help financially is terrifying to a kid right out of high school.

I also learned, through the work that I did for the university I went to, that the cost of attendance isn't as black and white as it's made out to be either. Although universities may differ in policies, they can make accommodations in your individual cost of attendance letter if you can justify the deviations. But I only learned of that flexibility after experiencing the system, and it wasn't clear at the outset. So I didn't even realize that was a possibility when evaluating acceptance offers and aid packages.

[1] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works

If you were accepted into multiple Ivies with full financial aid you were definitely eligible for work study and student loans.

Personally, I would recommend anyone in that situation to opt for the Ivy as it really does open doors later in life.

> Personally, I would recommend anyone in that situation to opt for the Ivy as it really does open doors later in life.

For anyone that comes across this post: I fully agree. I was fortunate in the particular intersection of my skills being comparatively rare, and having a professor that took a personal liking to me and acted as a mentor (while opening a few doors on my behalf through his connections). While I've been successful myself, it's been through connections I've made post-school (other than the bootstrapping from that one professor). I can't imagine the possibilities that would have come with seeding that entire process throughout school.

> If you were accepted into multiple Ivies with full financial aid you were definitely eligible for work study and student loans.

You're not wrong, but that was non-obvious at the time. The student loans were a particularly sticking point, as the cost of attendance letter provided by the schools had optimistic line items for personal expenses (which include books and supplies), creating an artificially low limit on the ability to take out loans. And I wasn't familiar enough with the college experience, nor had access to anyone that was, to understand the potential for work study. Better onboarding collateral geared towards first generation college students would have easily clarified things and provided confidence around this, rather than leaving a gaping unknown on how I was going to make ends meet.

> ... and student loans

With so many students exiting college with crippling debt, I'm not sure this is still a sustainable way of paying your way. Work study can certainly help, but the pay of even a fairly skilled job will fall far, far short of the cost of tuition, room and board, textbooks, etc.

This thread is about paying for books and clothes when tuition and room and board are covered by grants.

College football was bigger than pro football for a very long time, it wasn't until the 60's when pro football became more popular.

It has nearly always been the way it is now, big business.

72,000 capacity stadiums built in 1927 aren't built for school clubs to play in. Stadiums like this were built for schools like Michigan because the sport was big money.

I would not bet against the NFL. Still, the very short life of the XFL suggests to me that Americans want to see their minor league football with college branding.

College football is not a quality product. The kids are young, the vast majority aren’t going to even sniff a pro career, there are hundreds of teams to dilute all the talent and most of the games are blowouts. The entire business model is the personal connection with your school. There’s literally no other reason to watch.

> College football is not a quality product

The multi-billions of dollars spent on it begs to differ. Just because they aren't old (are 22 year olds really too young for athletics?) doesn't mean it is a bad product. Many consider it to be a much more exciting game opposed to the 7-3 games the NFL puts out.

I'd rather watch a 49-21 game than a 14-6 snoozefest.

This is really your personal opinion.

The vast majority of people don't watch football for "quality product". They watch for the fun of balls moving and people hitting and picking a tribe in a competition.

Football in general provides massive benefits to Universities.

1. Football (and mens basketball) are forced to pay more or less for the rest of all the other sports on campus[0]. Because of Title IX, student athletes/scholarships provided need to be equal across gender, which means that there need to be women's teams, which almost always lose money. You can make an argument that there shouldn't be other men's sports that lose money, but thats not what is being discussed.

2. Football/Collegiate sports in general are major drivers of diversity in colleges that are lacking in them. I've heard that at UC Berkeley that over half of black male students are athletes. Those are students that are very valuable for administrators trying to bring diversity to campuses.

3. Good football (and men's basketball) teams increase the rankings for the schools in general[1]. This has a demonstrable effect on student applications[2].

4. The culture around football games is that of partying. You go out, drink for a couple of hours before the game, and then stand in the sun for a couple of hours cheering for your team. They're fun when they're competitive, but Alabama was playing competition that was sub-par, so the games were out of hand by the end. Watching something exciting is fun. Watching something boring is not.

In my opinion, Nick Saban (Alabama's football coach) is probably the most underpaid state employee in the US.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/sportsmoney/2011/05/05/does-foo...

[1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739784?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

[2]https://www.nber.org/papers/w7227

“Nick Saban (Alabama's football coach) is probably the most underpaid state employee in the US.”

A coach that makes 5 million working with athletes that aren’t paid for risking their health is underpaid?

There's NFL coaches making twice as much as him while producing significantly worse results. And he's certainly bringing in more than $5 million of revenue and free marketing to the university

Then he should go to the NFL and hang with the big guys.

Is he personally bringing in the millions and the athletes nothing?

>Is he personally bringing in the millions and the athletes nothing?

I agree with the first half of your sentence and not the second. But I would argue that Saban is easily 10x more important to Alabama's success than any single athlete on the team. I think Bama's QB carousel backs up that claim.

> Then he should go to the NFL and hang with the big guys.

Financially that might be the best move for him, however I don't agree that everyone's main goal in life should be to maximize income. That said, if someone gave me $3 million to do a job I don't like as much as my current one, I'd jump on the opportunity. But if he's already making $5 million, there's diminishing returns.

> But I would argue that Saban is easily 10x more important to Alabama's success than any single athlete on the team.

Maybe they should pay him 10x more than they pay the students then. What's that work out to? If the students are being compensated with free tuition, 10x that is probably a few hundred thousand dollars, right?

> probably the most underpaid state employee

What about the athletes themselves who are taking years off their lives, while getting absolutely no compensation?

If we're solely talking about underpaid, then the absolute peak value of a college football player at the top of the game is probably under 10 million. IMO, the value of Saban is probably closer to 60 or 70 million[0], so he is more underpaid. Of course, the situation for players is a much more egregious underpayment.

[0] Really hard to quantify, but comparing the revenue effects and higher order revenue generation of programs with elite head coaches to mediocre head coaches leads to this value.

Depends on how you're measuring. Saban is making about 8mil (lazy math) and you think he's worth 70. Let's go crazy, and say he's actually even more valuable, and worth 80 million.

So he's making about 1/10th what he should, or 10% of his value.

Best student athlete is worth 8 million. They make $0. They're making 0% of their total value back.

The cost of the education is meaningless. It's all arbitrary and basically monopoly money costs. Oh, you're getting a full ride to a school that would normally charge you $50K? That's great, but it's not of real value in the same way that actual cash is.

This is why I'm a big fan of California's move to allow students to take endorsements.

They get room, board, all they can eat, an education (with an incredible amount of tutoring that is not available to the average student) and training that they absolutely could not get anywhere else. There's no market for minor league football in the US and there never will be.

Of course there won't be. Why would you create a minor league football program when you're competing against colleges that have: 1- Long term history with their fans 2- Better proximity to fanbases 3- No labor costs for their players 4- Stadiums and infrastructure already in place.

There is a market for minor league football, and that market is being met by college sports.

> What about the athletes themselves who are taking years off their lives, while getting absolutely no compensation?

1. They are compensated with a degree, and not to mention the "luxury" benefits that come with being an athlete: better food, housing, tutors, golf carts for class, etc.

2. No one is forcing them to go to college.

>20% of D1 college players don't even graduate.

If you get injured, poof scholarship

Just because no one is forcing them to do it doesn’t mean it’s not exploitative. No one forces people to work in sweatshops.

1. Sports can be financed by tuition and grants like everything else. Sports don't need to be expensive affairs with big travel and stadium budgets.

2. Since the pseudo-pro athletes are playing sports instead of studying, That's fake diversity of two separate programs in one building, like counting the cafe and janitorial staff in FAANG diversity. Better diversity would be letting diverse students in, not diverse football players. Letting students in explicitly because they provide muscle doesn't move society forward.

3. That's negative-sum, like the skyrocketing tuition due to making campuses into luxury country clubs just to compete with other schools. Rankings don't improve anything for the students and society at Aleve across the country.

4. Is negative sum. Football parties aren't a special benefit. Alcoholism and associated vices (like sexual assault) aren't a boon to a university's mission.

Thank you for a very rare educated post in a HN discussion around sports. Wish this was a top level comment to get voted higher up.

Regarding 1) Can the title IX issue be resolved by separating the sport budgets from academic budgets? If the football programs receive no money from the general budget, is their mere existence discriminatory, assuming equal numbers of scholarships are given to female athletes?

No, the number of scholarships is the issue, not the source of the dollars.

If one simply takes the behavior of the vast majority of universities in the US at face value it should be quite clear.

Their priority is not education, it is profit.

That's really it.

Believing otherwise is like believing the priority of health insurance companies is public health or the priority of for-profit prisons is rehabilitation.

Exactly.

America just needs to add a new section to the Constitution, and call it the "Rules of Acquisition".

The vast majority of universities in the US are non-profit institutions.

Can you elaborate how you think that applies to this discussion? Seems like you are arguing semantics to me.

The Church of Scientology is a considered a non-profit institution in the U.S. as well. Do you believe that The Church of Scientology is a benevolent actor? I don't. I believe their primary purpose is profit and they are taking advantage of their followers and the U.S. taxpayer in the same way these universities are.

The university in this article is "non-profit" as well, but they just granted a $70+ million contract to their football coach. I don't see how you can argue that this is appropriate for a non-profit institution whose priority is education when they are charging their 30,000+ undergraduates six figures to complete a four-year degree at the same time.

You said the motivation was "profit" which means that the owners of the organization make money that they can go spend on themselves as they please. This literally does not happen for the vast majority of universities.

What you are describing is more like "growth." And maybe the kinds of growth universities are investing in isn't great right now. That's a fine conversation to have.

This isn't just a semantic distinction. The profit motive and the kind of empire building growth motive are two pretty different things. You can see this because there ARE for-profit universities in the US and they act in dramatically different ways than the non-profits.

OK, I see. Even so, I think it's still totally fair to say that their behavior shows the priority is revenue or financial growth or enrichment of administrators over education.

Growth is a much more direct proxy for power than pure cash.

Why would we allow someone to gain power without giving back to the society which provides safety nets for that power?

I am pretty certain Scientologists enjoy every bit of that money (be it expensive cars, free travel, more followers for your ego) they don’t pay in tax.

The same goes for universities: growth without purpose are only there to satisfy the egos of those who manage the money they never earned.

I agree with you but want to pick the nit that while ownership can't treat a nonprofit as a slush fund, management generally can.

"Non-profit" doesn't mean that profit isn't the primary motive. It just means you can't show any profit, or return it to shareholders, as in a corporation.

Instead, you do things like giving the University President an absurdly enormous salary, plus put him up in a lavish mansion, or go on a construction spree, building more and more very expensive buildings and stadiums, or give a 7-figure salary to the football coach.

One of my fondest memories from school was the biennial renovations of the dean of natural sciences' offices.

It is of course perfectly possible to be a fan of football, sane, and show a proper sense of proportion.

Really in some cases football isn't big fron being a cash cow or "lotto ticket" for a society that views it as an acceptable way to make it big but frankly a cult. It doesn't matter to them if it is a poor investment or if there are horrifying human costs. It is an end to itself and all who question it are the enemy. Penn State and their Sandusky handling is a particularly infamous example of the mentality.

The local fervor is what leads to its undue emphasis where voters balk at funding for textbooks or class sizes but approve oversized stadiums without a thought. Undue emphasis is a symptom of anti-intellectualism in that they don't value education or view it as actively "betraying" their culture in a tall poppy way. Football is a way to get rich without "betrayal" of their self-perpetuated station.

That aside I suspect the institutions adapt to this by knowing that a football team raises their public profile more than academics. Which could be considered a "tradition" - a legacy of population and education. Since during industrial eras the vast body to market to were farm and factory families who never went to college - regardless of intelligence they would have little reason outside of personal interest to follow the academic details. This isn't a sleight on them - most don't follow areas of expertise outside their profession except for personal interest. Even if outdated for the purpose the institutions are still in place.

Many students who attend American universities aren't just buying education. They are buying a "college experience" of which sports are a major part.

That might be a reason for the system to remain as it is, but it doesn't explain why the system is that way in the first place.

Furthermore, if the desires of the students were really the root motivation, then Alabama wouldn't need to manipulate the desires of students by providing weird point-system incentives.

And we should fix that. Sending kids to $100K parties that cripple their career prospects is bad. Fun is great, but not at this cost.

> It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship, when it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education,

People are arguing in the comments about the money, history and prestige US football brings to colleges in the US. I have to wonder in other parts of the world does soccer have such sway over universities? Are there universities that have soccer programs that bring in large sums of money for the university?

Soccer (football to the rest of the world) is probably 100 times as big with arguably ~6.5 billion vs ~300 million fans. It probably generates 100 times the profit of US football. It would be odd that the US college and football relationship is so strong when soccer is immensely bigger in every way.

> I have to wonder in other parts of the world does soccer have such sway over universities? Are there universities that have soccer programs that bring in large sums of money for the university?

Here in Germany I am not aware of any substantial sports teams by universities. Universities here also generally don't offer any scholarships for athletes. AFAIK, the situation in the rest of Europe is similar. The sports programs that are offered at universities here are very casual and comparable to a cheaper gym membership in purpose.

Your question seems to indicate that you aren't from the United States.

College football is just one sport among many popular college sports in the U.S.

It began as a club-type extra curricular activity but as it became more popular universities likely saw it as a way to market their school and attract customers (students).

The top 30-40 programs produce $100 million in revenue which is usually enough to be self-sustaining and help pay for all the other sports teams on campus.

College basketball, baseball, football, track and field, and even hockey in some places are de facto minor leagues. The power and influence of the NFL is probably more to blame for the lack of a proper minor league in football.

Also, NFL career average is something like 3 years. They take a beating and I don't think the NFL would take people who had taken a beating for a few years after college. In fact lately there has been a trend of top talent sitting out their college bowl game just to avoid any risk of injury.

There was push-back a while ago to where the schools were using the student's identity for college based video games and profiting off the student's names, and the students never saw anything from it.

There was a suit and the college kids won!

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/18/sports/ncaa-video-game-la...

College football players need a union. The upper echelons make millions, and the students get a free ride and traumatic brain injuries. Hardly a fair deal.

A lot of students don't really get a free ride. They get a free ride to be on the team, like an unpaid internship. The realities of a D1 team is that, depending on the school and the player, barely go to school.

In D1 the priority is Sports, Academics. I played in D3 where the priority is Academics, Sports. We calculated we spent at least 800 hours per season on the sport. About 3000 hours over 4 years. D1 sports is more like 2000+ hours per season (aka a full job). Imagine how well you'd do at a full time uni if you were working 8 hours a day in construction at the same time. And that's if the school prioritizes you playing sports.

Personally I think they should be allowed to get a education benefit that grants them one free year of classes for every year of sports played for use at any time in their lives post sports. That way when they end the sports dream they can get the education they paid for by working.

> In D1 the priority is Sports, Academics.

That is an uncharitable overgeneralization. There are 345 D1 schools. Many, if not most, do not have that prioritization.

If you are playing for a scholarship the emphasis is on sports, if it's not you lose the scholarship. It doesn't have to be direct emphasis.

I talked to the coaches for a few D1 schools, even ones who weren't known to be good at sports and heavy on academics like Northwestern (at the time) had a little talk with prospective players about the balance between the two. They recommended you do not attempt any difficult majors while playing football as the conflict between the two would be too difficult to manage.

That is directly putting sports above academics. And that was for practice squad kids.

Yes there may be schools that are better at it, but scholarships change the equation.

I've talked to many many people who played college sports at all levels, this may not be statistical but this was well over 100 people.

I agree. Some players at Northwestern tried a few years back and the NLRB ruled against them. See https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/sports/ncaafootball/nlrb-...

Not going to happen because of the way Title IX works. Most universities would just shut down their athletic departments because the backup women's water polo player would be required to earn the same salary as the star Heisman-winning QB.

Of course the end result was that the game series was discontinued.

Given the increasing public backlash to football-related injuries, specifically brain injuries, this is likely a problem that will solve itself over time. There's an increasingly small pool of parents who are willing to let their children play a sport where there's a very slim chance of professional success but a pretty high chance of permanent brain damage.

Unfortunately under the current system, parents are motivated to let their kids play the game not just by the prospect of professional success, but also by the prospect of admission into a school.

If football were brought into line with other college club sports, the pressure to pick football in particular would be diminished. People looking for academic scholarships could instead choose to play something less hazardous, without worrying that they were limiting their opportunities.

I hate it too, but its clearly profitable - people want to watch football and spend money on tickets and merchandise, and universities ended up being a good vehicle to drive fanbases. Its not realistic to ask people to not want to be football fans and not spend money on that interest, and not realistic to ask universities to not take that money.

The most realistic potential improvement I can see is requiring public universities to reinvest some percentage of sports program profits (mostly coming from football/basketball in the US) back into academic programs and tuition assistance for non-athletes. Currently many unversities have academics and sports existing in separate financial universes.

Edit: The same universities do reinvest football/basketball profits back into other sports programs, which is great. Athleticism in general is IMO an essential part of education. But universities need to remember their core mission is education, and everything that a university does needs to feed that mission somehow.

> "I hate it too, but its clearly profitable"

That's not clear to me. Google tells me there are nearly 800 university football teams in America. Alabama is obviously top-tier and is doubtlessly profitable. But how many of the other hundreds are profitable?

The statement was scoped to NCAA Division 1 schools, which I imagine all have profitable football programs. However most of those also happen to be top-tier academic and research schools as well (there are of course exceptions), so I'm comfortable scoping the conversation to those schools.

Well as I said previously, I take issue with the scheme as a whole.

Furthermore, don't many players, coaches, etc, transfer up from lower divisions when they demonstrate themselves to have exceptional merit? It's not clear to me that Division 1 wouldn't be impacted if the lower divisions were eliminated. If that's true, then lower divisions are effectively subsidizing higher divisions, so it's a mistake to consider the matter on a case by case basis rather than holistically.

No. It's rare for players to transfer up. In fact, the ones that do transfer are usually the ones who do have professional prospects but aren't currently projected as lottery pics (and some who are, like Jalen Hurts transferring from Alabama to Oklahoma).

For players, there's some transfers but I certainly wouldn't say "many"

I don't think that's necessarily true. It's true for the Big 5 "Power" conferences because they negotiate enormous media contracts, but if you're a mid-major school in a 2nd or 3rd tier city, and especially if you're not a consistent winner, I think profitability is a very high bar.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidching/2018/04/17/big-tens-...

https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/espn-reaches...

On that latter deal with ESPN, note that the $470m/yr ESPN pays for the CFP games is relatively in the same ballpark as the NFL rights for Monday Night Football games ($600m/yr).

"Defenders of the current system will often claim that football is profitable for universities and provides funding for academics"

It is spectacularly profitable at some schools, and often provides funding for the entire athletics departments (every scholarship for every fringe sport, etc).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2019/09/12/college-f...

Of course it isn't profitable for all schools, but it certainly is for Alabama, and for most of the other schools that generally come up in the "football is expensive" discussion.

It isn't academic, but at the same time neither is music, or the arts, or many other essential elements of many post-secondary experiences. It has always been about more than the pure sciences or maths.

>it's plain to see that football itself has nothing to do with education, except insofar as it's an activity that many students enjoy

I disagree with this. I was a college athlete. I firmly believe that being an athlete teaches you more about being a leader, a teammate and having discipline than almost anything else. Those are extremely desirable skills to have in any work place. I do think any team based activity can build the same skills if there's a common goal to be achieved. College athletes just have the guarantee that they've been doing it for multiple years.

Football players get picked on all the time because of a lot incorrect stereotypes about the people that do it. Not all football players are idiots. Look up John Urschel.

> Not all football players are idiots.

There are probably some who wouldn't be accepted to their school on academic merit alone.

Aside from that, I'm very opposed to college football (and soccer) as it's played now because of what we know know about brain injuries. I wouldn't be surprised to see a class action lawsuit in the future from current players that shuts down the programs at a lot of smaller schools.

Any coach working today knows that the way they are asking the kids to play will injure them.

Once, on a hiring committee, someone said their definition of a "decent [American] college" was "You've heard of their football team".

I suspect that's a pretty prevalent opinion, wrong as it may be.

> Why can't the American football industry run itself more like the American baseball industry? Instead of leeching off universities, particularly public universities, they could be operating minor leagues independent of any educational system.

College baseball exists, and some of the best teams in the country are from public universities. It's also generally considered a revenue sport (although admittedly not on the level of football).

>It's not at all clear to me why we allow American football and universities to have such a perverse relationship,

Money, lots and lots of money.

This is a very uninformed, topical response. Football on college basically pays for all other sport on campus. Athletics are an extremely important part of a well rounded education (today more that ever!). A lot of activities and school pride are based on the sports team so the benefits there are enourmous if not tangible or quantifiable immediately.

> And in cases like this, where students are leaving the game early, it's perhaps not an activity that students enjoy after all.

This is completely misunderstanding what's happening. They're leaving early because the game is already decided. When the score is 62-10 in the 4th quarter, you're no longer watching a competition.

If the game is meant to entertain the students, and the students are no longer entertained by that particular instance of the game, then why is it so important to the school that students remain inside the stadium?

It really seems to me that the school has somehow made these student/spectators a product in some way. Perhaps it looks better to network television if the stadium stays packed the entire game?

Yes, it obviously is a better image to have your school look engaged, rather than absent, on national TV.

But the other reason (for schools with prominent teams) is that the number of seats available is often less than the number of students who might want to attend, so to be fair to students who actually want to attend, it becomes necessary to disincentive people from requesting tickets if they’re not serious about attending.

It’s pretty common for schools to give out tickets in a lottery system, and then penalize your future ability to successfully get a ticket if you show a pattern of not actually using the tickets. Back when I was in school, this was tracked by scanning the tickets when you entered.

>why we allow

Who do you mean by we?

I'm not familiar with the american university system but how much public (say tax) money does a private university like Stanford get (which also has a good football team).

I am concerned primarily by the involvement of public schools. I think private schools doing it is also dumb, but perhaps it's their prerogative to be dumb in ways that shouldn't be tolerated from public schools.

The ncaa is just legal slavery. That includes college baseball.

College athletes participate voluntarily.

strong athletic performance drives alumni donations, that’s it

There is college baseball.

I'm firmly in the camp that sports have nothing to do with education, and there should be no association of organized sports and public educational institutions whatsoever. Gym class is one thing, but after-school sports have nothing to do with receiving a basic education.

Why should schools only provide a basic education? There are a great many reasons to participate in after school sports: general health and fitness, teamwork, confidence, community.

Schools can't do this too?

Intramural, participatory sports are a wonderful thing. I have never heard anyone argue against them.

They don't require stadiums with amenities that would make royalty blush, nor seven-figure salaries paid to coaches.

Do you know what revenue the Florida State, Alabama, Texas A&M football programs bring in? The head coach if Texas A&M brings more revenue and prestige to the school (and thus higher student demand, more donations, and more licensing deals,) than some professor of gender studies does. The head coach of a top tier BCS school probably is responsible for more revenue than even the president of the university. Nobody would have ever heard of Clemson or Gonzaga without sports and most of the big state schools like Michigan would have a far lower demand without their sports programs.

There is some argument that colleges shouldn’t be a feeder for the NBA or NFL. Couldn’t we say the same about Google or any other tech company? Why should the universities be feeders for talent for private business? It’s ridiculous when you consider it that way. Why should Google benefit from a San Jose State University computer science graduate if the 49ers shouldn’t benefit from a UCLA student athlete?

Professional sports is a significant part of the US economy. [1] We could argue that programs such as gender studies, anthropology, or Classics are both heavily subsidized and pretty useless from an economic standpoint. Yet, we pay five-figure salaries to professors and six figure salaries to administrators affiliated with those fields.

I am not arguing against the value of those fields per se, only pointing out that sports are a very significant part of society and the economy, like it or not. From the benefit of the university standpoint, sports have a tremendous impact. Not many people are proud of and donate to the University of Texas because of a world-renowned ancient literature program — but because of football.

I don’t particularly like college football — I prefer baseball, however it is an exciting part of the year, especially if you are a student or alum. We waste billions of government money on ridiculous projects all the time. I think the price tag on California’s high speed train to Bakersfield is in the multi-billions? There is government funding to study the sex habits of tsetse flies? $38 million in federal money was wasted on a Ted Kennedy institute? We subsidize NPR and the National Endowment of the Arts. To be clear, I am not arguing against the National Endowment generally, only suggesting that most people don’t care about the next Mapplethorpe as they care about the next Tom Brady. Giving $5 of government money to subsidize an exhibition of Andres Serrano whose art featured a crucifix submerged in his own urine or $5 to a high school or college athletic program? Or $5 to a gender studies program? What choice would most people make? Personally, I would vote to just keep my $5 and let the people that wanted those programs to pay for it out of their own pocket.

So why are we complaining about college sports again — something tens of millions of people care about. NPR has about 30 million listeners. College football has an audience of over 160 million people. [2] The LSU-Texas game last weekend had over 5 million viewers. That’s about 6 times as many viewers as CNN gets during prime time.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/sports/football/2011/09/09/how_the_n... [2] https://footballfoundation.org/news/2019/6/11/2018-19_Attend...

> Couldn’t we say the same about Google or any other tech company? Why should the universities be feeders for talent for private business? It’s ridiculous when you consider it that way. Why should Google benefit from a San Jose State University computer science graduate if the 49ers shouldn’t benefit from a UCLA student athlete?

I've been saying precisely this. The public is footing the bill for training employees for corporations.

The reason is money. Where I'm from, only the rich kids do after school sports. The poor kids have two working parents and they can't afford to miss work to pick them up after school. We're subsidizing the rich kids to play sports with public funds, and that's total BS. Not everyone lives in a city, so they can't just take a public bus home after school and the after-school activity buses were canceled.

That doesn't really fit my experience. Both my parents were working hard hours when I was in highschool and my participation in after-school sports meant that I was occupied until they finished out their work day (which ends in the evening, contrasting with the schoolday which ended in the early afternoon.) Practice before school was convenient for the same reason; my dad had to leave for work at 4:30am, and my practice started at 5am, so that worked out well.

That's a nice anecdote.

In the real world, though, athletics keep at-risk kids in school and trying to get grades because they want to play and need to make satisfactory progress in order to do so. Athletics have helped a ton of kids grow into prosperous adults because it kept them invested in their educations until they realized that it's what they needed to do anyway.

In better-run countries, poor kids don't need to be picked up by parents, or take a bus home; instead, they just walk home.

The notion that there's anything inherently wrong with walking is really bizarre.

Of course that is bizarre.

It is also bizarre to make a claim about "better run" countries where people just walk home instead of other transport methods

Edit: You seem to be having a conversation with yourself and making points that no one is arguing with. Maybe try replying to what people say instead of forming a different argument and then attacking that.

I don't think it's bizarre to say that urban planning that prioritizes walkability is 'better'. Sure it's opinionated which may be taboo these days, but is it a bizarre opinion? No, I don't think so.

Of course there are plenty of American communities that I'd describe as highly walkable, but even then you have social matters to contend with, such as rampant "stranger danger" paranoia and lawsuit culture that, in America, have some school district in walkable communities forbidding students to walk to school for liability/paranoia reasons. I don't think it's bizarre to describe communities without those two issues as 'better.'

You've completely changed your argument. First it was "sports have nothing to do with receiving a basic education." Now you concede that participating in sports can be a big positive, but in some cases a positive only available to the children of richer students.

To that I say:

1) Plenty of poor kids do find ways to participate in school sports. Let's not throw that baby out with the bathwater.

2) Where this is not possible, it would be better to find ways to make it possible than to get rid of something good for everyone.

I never said sports were bad. Organized team sports after-school are not part of a basic education. Since after-school sports activities favor the well-off, we should not use public funds for such activities. Those education dollars should be spent to help the education part, not the rich-kid sports part.

If you want to have public sports programs, that's fine. It has nothing to do with school, should be an entirely separate pool of money, and IMO, should be entirely self-funded.

I learned as much playing sports in highschool as I did in classes. They helped me mature greatly and were a great fit with my adolescent frustrations and anger. My mom tried to keep me out in 7th grade because she thought I'd get hurt. In 8th I had grown so she let me play. She says this was by fat the best decision she ever made, change was marked in weeks. For context had pretty heavy ADD (still do) and was pretty large and had a temper. I was able to channel and leverage those in sports and figure out how to be productive and not just an angry ass.

In college sports (D3, which is a different ballgame and likely closer to what most people would imagine as "clubs") I learned a bunch as well, about leadership, organization, time management etc. We actually did much better in class during season because we had -5 hours a week of free time due to sports.

My university's sports are all funded through a calculation they did on alumni donations. Those who played sports are most likely to give money, so they keep the sports going as it has a marked impact on donations.

Compare the proportion of MLB players that came from the university system, and the proportion of NFL players that did. Most MLB players come from minor leagues operating independantly from the university system.

I'm not suggesting that universities ban sports clubs. I object to university systems become the primary feeder for corporate professional leagues. American Football and Basketball do it. Baseball and normal Football do not.

You can object to sports feeding corporate. But university feed corporations in every area.

I object to tuition going up 8% a year for the last 3 decades That's a much bigger problem even though it's sort of topic to the original article.

>American Football and Basketball do it. Baseball and normal Football do not.

It would be so much easier if they just called American Football "handegg".