Is Football Really Worth It? Plus…The $2,000 Question
Would Colleges Be Better Off Without Football?
By Jordan Weissmann
Jordan Weissmann is an associate editor at The Atlantic. He has written for a number of publications, including The Washington Post and The National Law Journal.
This article courtesy of www.theatlantic.com
Everything we think we know about college football’s impact on students’ grades, graduation rates, rankings, and school finances adds up to this: Football might be bad for some colleges
When college football’s final bowl games are played in the coming weeks, they’ll be a coda to a season defined by scandal. There was the demise of Ohio State coach Jim Tressel, who tried to cover up evidence that his players had broken NCAA rules by trading memorabilia for money and tattoos. There were the revelations that a convicted ponzi schemer and University of Miami booster had lavished millions on dollars on cash, cars and prostitutes for school’s players. There was the nightmarish sex abuse scandal at Penn State. The list, sadly, goes on.
It’s hard not to wonder: Is college football really good for college? Taylor Branch delivered a tour de force take for The Atlantic this year on the injustices suffered by big time collegiate athletes. But what about the rest of the university? What does football culture do for the students who don’t play every Saturday? What does football do for schools’ finances? Their academics? Their reputations?
These are questions economists have been plumbing for years. Here’s a taste of what they have to say.
DOES COLLEGE FOOTBALL MAKE SCHOOLS RICHER OR POORER?
Short answer: It enriches the powerhouses, but the larger story is mixed.
When it comes to raw earning power, college football programs are pretty evenly split between haves and have-nots. The media tends to focus on powerhouse schools such as the Universities of Alabama, Michigan, and Texas, which rake in tens of millions of dollars from ticket sales, TV deals, and merchandise. But those teams are just one part of a much larger and more complicated picture.
In August, the NCAA released a financial breakdown of college athletics programs from 2004 through 2010. In those years, hardly more than half of the roughly 120 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the old Division 1-A, generated a profit from football. Those teams netted a median gain of $9.1 million. Among the programs stuck in the red, their median loss was $2.9 million. So for elite football schools, the game is a cash cow capable of subsidizing less remunerative sports. For the gridiron also-rans, it’s just one more expense.
By and large, economists haven’t focused on direct revenues. Instead, they’ve tried to probe the common claim by university administrators that alumni are happier to donate when football teams win. More than a dozen studies have tried to put that folk wisdom to the test, but the jury’s still out. For instance, a 2004 study by University of North Carolina at Charlotte professor Irvin Tucker found that better records and bowl appearances could boost alumni giving. Looking at data from dozens of big conference schools, he found that, over a six year period, a 10% jump in winning percentage, an extra bowl game, or extra appearance in the AP coaches poll appearance could increase donations by 1%. On the other hand, a 2001 paper that examined the behavior of thousands of individual alumni donors found no such relationship.
For public universities, though, there’s a crucial audience to consider other than alums: legislators. In 2003, UMBC’s Brad Humphreys looked at the relationship between gridiron glory and appropriations by state lawmakers. He found that winning teams received more generous treatment come budget season, especially if they went to a bowl game or won a major in-state rivalry match, such as the annual Iron Bowl between the University of Alabama and Auburn. “A successful football season might increase state appropriations by 5% to 8% in the following year, and a team with a respectable losing record might garner a 2% to 4% increase, other things equal,” Humphreys concluded. “Very bad teams — those that win only 1 or 2 games — get a smaller increase in appropriation in the following year.”
Ultimately, the biggest problem with treating college football as a financial investment is that pouring in more funding doesn’t guarantee better returns. Before his days in the White House, former Office of Management and Budget Peter Orszag was part of a team commissioned by the NCAA to analyze the impact of athletic spending on colleges. Looking at data from 1993 to 2001, his study found that spending more on football didn’t lead to a more profitable team. It also didn’t lead to additional alumni giving. Why not? Possibly because that teams that upped their funding didn’t necessarily improve their records. Nor did a better record guarantee increased revenue. So schools can spend all the money they want in the hopes of becoming the next LSU. It just doesn’t mean they’ll get results.
IS COLLEGE FOOTBALL GOOD FOR A SCHOOL’S REPUTATION?
Short answer: Winning teams could lead to more applications and higher college rankings.
For many schools, then, it might be tough to justify a football program strictly in terms of dollars and cents. But there’s another, less tangible benefit: marketing. Schools tend to view their football programs as giant billboards. It’s nationally televised advertising. And there’s a pervasive belief that a big win on the field can lead to a surge in student applications. There’s even have a name for the phenomenon: The Flutie Effect.
In 1984, quarterback Doug Flutie led Boston College to an upset win over reigning national champs the University of Miami, capping the game with an awe-inspiring, 60-yard hail Mary touchdown pass, still regarded as one of the greatest plays in sports history. Over the next two years, applications to Boston College jumped 30%.* Northwestern University saw a similar spike in student interest after its highly improbable 1995 Rose Bowl run. So did The University of Florida after it won titles in basketball and football in 2006.
Those kinds of seasons are rare, however. That’s why fans still talk about them decades later. But research suggests that the Flutie Effect may also occur in regular old wining years. In one of the most highly regarded studies on the topic, a team from Virginia Tech looked at how winning affected applications at big time football and basketball schools between 1983 and 2002. It found that football programs that finished in the AP Top 20 saw 2.5% more applications the next year. A national championship drove between 7-8% more. Schools in the top twenty also had higher enrollment rates. The extra applications came from students with high and low SAT scores alike, meaning a win on the field gave schools a chance to improve their academic credentials.
Students aren’t the only ones who get drawn in by the hype around a bowl run. Academics take notice too. In 2010, a group of researchers investigated the effect of football success on a school’s peer assessment score in U.S. News and World Report’s annual college rankings. It found that finishing strong in the year-end rankings could have the same effect as a 42 point boost in SAT scores. “Football school” might be an insult in the ivory tower. But oddly, fielding a good team just might boost a school’s academic reputation.
IS COLLEGE FOOTBALL BAD FOR ACADEMICS?
Short answer: Winning teams appear to be bad for grades, but good for graduation rates.
Of course, reputation is one thing. Performance is another. In terms of academics, football culture appears to be a mixed blessing for universities. In a working paper released earlier this month, professors from the University of Oregon tracked how students’ grades were influenced by the school’s football success. Not just student athletes. All students. The team used their own institution as the guinea pig. The Oregon Ducks’ seasons over the past decade had ranged from middling to superb, which allowed the group to see how students reacted in good years and bad.
The results weren’t pretty. When Oregon won more, men’s grades dropped relative to women’s. When they lost, men’s grades recovered. In a survey that accompanied their grade analysis, 28% of male students reported drinking more when a team won. About 20% of women said the same. Shotgunning a celebratory postgame beer, it seems, isn’t conducive with studying for an economics final.
But even if tailgating might sink the GPAs at your local Beta Theta Pi chapter, it might also convince some of its brothers to stick around for graduation. Like many issues surrounding college football, the relationship between school-wide graduation rates and football prowess is still a bit murky. But recent findings suggest that winning on the field might actually increase the number of students who earn a degree.
There are three camps on the issue. The first subscribes to a theory known as “football fever.” It’s pretty much what it sounds like. The phrase was coined in 1992 by University of North Carolina at Charlotte professor Irvin Tucker (see above), who at the time found that graduation rates were lower at schools with strong football traditions, as students ignored their studies to party. But his findings were eventually challenged. In 2003, Patrick Rishe of Webster University published a paper finding no significant link between big time sports success and graduation rates. Then, just one year later a pair from the University of Southern Mississippi found that a better football team actually improved freshman retention rates. They called their model “football chicken soup,” arguing that students simply felt more comfortable and connected to a university that celebrated sports. Interestingly, Tucker later adopted their theory. In a 2004 study, he took a new approach to the data using additional measures of success. This time, there was a positive link between winning and academics. For instance, a 10% increase in winning percentage over six years pumped up graduation rates by 2.1%.
The theory for why was intuitive. Football might be an expensive distraction from academics. But when push comes to shove, students just like sticking around to root for their teams. Even if it means tanking their econ final.
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Enough Already With the Little Guy
Why College Football’s Power Conferences Should Ditch the Smaller Ones; the $2,000 Question
By RACHEL BACHMAN
This article courtesy of http://online.wsj.com
Here’s the thing about the plucky, upstart schools clambering up the ladder of college football’s highest echelon: Their time has come. That is, it’s time to peel back their fingers and let them fall.
For major-college football leaders to acknowledge the sport’s modern reality—not only the money pouring in, but the desperate, destabilizing conference-jumping it’s sparked—they must deal with the leeches in their midst. Football’s leaders must confront the schools that Ohio State president Gordon Gee derided in a deliciously candid 2010 interview as the “Little Sisters of the Poor.”
The Akron-Ohio State game in September. Do these two programs belong on the same level?
The NCAA’s members must do the same thing they did in 1978 when the ranks of Division I got unwieldy. They need to create a new tier for football schools with means—Texas, Florida, Notre Dame—and a lower one for wannabes. Sorry, South Alabama. Too bad, Troy.
The nation’s poorer programs need to drop down because they drain money from their schools, keep bigger programs from reforming rules and often limp along academically—all while having no real shot at winning it all.
The gulf between rich and poor has widened with the influx of money through the Bowl Championship Series, the system that selects two teams to play for the national title. In 1993, the year that BCS-precursor Bowl Coalition began, football revenues in the NCAA’s top division ranged from less than $1 million to $20 million, according to Daniel Fulks, who compiles an annual report on NCAA schools. By 2010 that range had balooned: $1 million to $94 million.
Even in the mighty, 120-team Football Bowl Subdivision, 43 percent of teams lose money—some of them as much as $10 million a year. They’re falling behind despite enjoying BCS windfalls: In the current season of BCS games, the five lowest-level conferences will rake in $13 million without having one team suit up.
Taking from one’s higher-achieving competitors is dubious enough, but these programs also are mooching off their own universities.
Alabama-Birmingham’s athletic department consumed over $13 million in university funds and student fees in 2008-09, largely because the football program bled money. New Mexico State’s athletic department got a nearly 70% subsidy in 2009-10, weighted by the albatross of a football team that hasn’t reached a bowl in 51 years. (Neither UAB nor New Mexico State responded to a request for comment.) Meanwhile, public funding for universities has plummeted.
At least athletes in underdog programs are getting a good, free education, right? Not always.
The NCAA has docked Idaho football 15 scholarships over the past five years for lagging academically. Idaho has four people—two full-time—dedicated to academic support. (The school didn’t return a request for comment.) No. 1-ranked LSU, on the other hand, has a palatial, wood-paneled academic center for athletes and a support staff of 26. The Tigers have never been docked a football scholarship for a systemic academic failing.
Idaho isn’t alone: In major-college football’s five lesser conferences, football teams have been docked scholarships for academic failures 47 times, compared with nine times in the six major conferences.
A recent NCAA decision underscores the debate about who belongs in football’s top division. An NCAA committee, responding to public cries that players should get a larger share of college football’s multi-billion-dollar pot, enacted a $2,000-per-athlete stipend schools could offer if they so chose. Southeastern Conference coaches like South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier were all for giving more to players. But almost as fast as the measure passed, poorer schools voted to overturn it.
Prominent programs’ frustrations festered in the 1970s, when the NCAA was a motley collection of disparately sized athletic programs with equal voting rights and shared television revenues. “The big schools felt that they were being held captive to this socialist impulse,” said Keith Dunnavant, who wrote a book about TV’s impact on college football.
In 1978 Division I football— the sport’s highest level—split into two tiers: I-A, with a higher scholarship limit and a more national focus, and I-AA, with fewer scholarships and a more local focus. But political wrangling forced more teams into football’s top tier than financially belonged, exacerbating the divisions that led the big schools to sue to gain their TV rights.
Power shifted from the NCAA to the conferences, and in recent years the major conferences have capitalized by signing blockbuster deals with TV networks. The contracts only further distanced them from the smaller schools.
Hence the frantic leaps in recent months of lower-rung programs like San Diego State from the Mountain West Conference to the Big East. Poorer programs particularly target conferences whose winners get automatic berths in BCS bowls.
In college basketball, where smaller squads mean a smaller investment, relative unknowns like George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth have reached the Final Four. But top-level football’s little guys have no such chance. Only 14 different teams have appeared in the BCS title game, out of 28 slots, all from major conferences. There is no competitive reason to keep the little guys around.
It’s true that even some big schools’ athletic departments lose money, and that many are subsidized. But big-school football programs in major conferences make money. And they’ll make even more as the bulk of billion-dollar TV contracts flows into power conferences like the Pac-12, Big Ten and SEC.
Although the teams fleeing poorer conferences might see a bump by jumping to a higher-rent conference, they will only find stability in one of the very richest, Fulks said. Even those on the bubble aren’t safe.
“This is a matter of the haves and have-nots,” he said. “I don’t care how many schools you put in the Big East. Most of them are still not going to be profitable financially.”
