The NCAA is a billion-dollar “not for profit” business. They don’t pay taxes (neither does the NFL.) Their executives earn over a million dollars. It’s a business and the worker bees are our kids.
@northwesty, I’m not sure if Swarthmore recruits athletes, but, for instance, you will find a decent number of athletes at Caltech as well. That doesn’t mean that Caltech earmarks spots for jocks however (Caltech explicitly doesn’t). It just means that they have some students who want to play those sports. You’ll find a decent number of students at UK unis participating in sports and a good percentage at UF engaged in intramurals and club sports as well, for instance.
Why don’t the D1 colleges just host amateur teams that play under their banner? The athletes don’t have to be students, at least in football and basketball. That would solve a lot of problems. The college would still have teams to root for, but would not have to bend admissions standards or offer sham degrees to athletes who can barely read.
For the most part, from D3 to the Ivies to Bowl Programs…its taken on an uber level of seriousness, i.e. monetization. I mean consider that Y, won the D1 Ice Hockey Championship, just a couple of years ago, says a lot about the level of athlete, even for a non-mainstream sport like Ice Hockey.
earlvandorn…in that case albama and michigan can have football teams. louisville and kentucky can have basketball teams along with duke. I am sure I missed a few schools (sports is not my thing) and the rest of the schools can refocus on education.
this is my opinion…I do not in a million years think anyone but a few people agree with me and even fewer care what I think.
sports and frats in my view both should have no part in the college expiernce. ( the frats do seem to be self imploding as of late)
I do not want sports or frats banned I want them to disappear because of a change in the culture on college campuses and what the students see as their priorities and in the case of frats not needing the validity of joining an exclusionary group ! (hazing and being phony aside)
“The difference is that Florida cedes a certain number of admissions slots to its athletic department. Swarthmore does not.”
The D3 coach is provided a certain amount of slack to admit a certain number of athletes who would not be able to get in without the coach’s thumb on the scale. Each Swarthmore coach gets a budget from the admissions department. So do the coaches at Florida. Different standards apply, but the process is essentially the same.
The amount of seats and money and emphasis that dinky little D3 schools like Haverford and Williams and Swarthmore devote to their sports teams is really high and pretty inexplicable. It has been widely written about.
Read the NY Times series below from a few years back and you’ll be surprised how big a deal sports is even at these tiny high academic schools and the Ivies. In their own way, their sports are as over the top as Alabama’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/sports/ncaafootball/haverford-debates-impact-of-athletics.html
Athletics was important to the founders of the schools, not at the super competitive levels it is today, but many of the elite schools had physical education requirements aND ithe was more fun to compete as a team than jus do exercises. To be a Rhodes scholar, there is an athletic requirement. The service academies require participation in a sport. From the time my kids were in first grade I felt they did better in their academic classes on the days they had PE (every third school day), especially if there was no outside recess because of weather. Some people will not do any physical exercise if it isn’t required, and others need a great deal of exercise and competition to be successful in other aspects of life.
The big revenue sports are important for marketing the schools, but the majority of student athletes play small sports. My daughter plays in front of ‘crowds’ of 75 or 104, mostly parents and roommates and other athletes who come to cheer. She gets the benefit of playing, the school gets 15 or so kids who otherwise wouldn’t have picked this school. Every once in a while, a small sports program has a breakout team. Yale might win at hockey. Butler makes a run in March Madness. It’s exciting. People who had never heard of Butler look it up. Boise State. Where did that team come from?
IF you don’t like sports and don’t want to support teams, pick a school that doesn’t have them. Hard to find, and you won’t get to go to an Ivy or Stanford, but that’s your choice. Go to school in England or Germany if you think those schools are better in line with what a school should offer or not offer. Go to Caltech where sports are played for fun and not competition (clearly).
That’s not right. Or at least it’s misleading. As a member of the Big Ten Conference, Michigan doesn’t have a separate TV contract. The conference has contracts with television networks including ABC, ESPN, and the Big Ten Network (a cable/satellite network of which the Big Ten conference is co-owner along with Fox) that allow those networks to broadcast a certain number of Big Ten games. All that money goes to the conference which then distributes it in equal shares to conference members. Last year’s distribution was $32 million per school; Michigan got no more and no less than, say, Indiana, even though almost no one watches Indiana football. And by the way, that $32 million isn’t all football broadcast revenue; it represents each school’s fractional share of the conference’s total net revenue, so it includes, e.g., payouts from football bowl appearances (all that money, after expenses, goes to the conference, not to the participating school), basketball broadcast revenues, NCAA basketball tournament revenue, etc., though football broadcast revenue is by far the largest part of it.
Unless you mean that Michigan football generates $85 million annually in TV rights for the conference. I’ve never seen that figure, but it’s possible. Michigan football broadcasts get extremely high TV ratings–an average of 5.3 million viewers per game in 2013, good for third place behind Alabama (6.5 million), virtually tied with #2 Texas A&M (5.3 million), slightly ahead of #4 Ohio State (5.2 million), and well ahead of #9 Notre Dame (3.8 million) and in-state rival #10 Michigan State (3.9 million). and that’s in a year when Michigan football wasn’t very good. Michigan’s average rating of 3.3 was nearly double the 1.84 average rating for all Big Ten conference games. So it’s probably fair to conclude that it’s Michigan and Ohio State, and to a lesser extent Michigan State and Nebraska, that are responsible for most of the value of those TV contracts; those are the only Big Ten schools whose TV ratings are above the conference average. But they’re not getting rich themselves off TV broadcast rights; they’re sharing the wealth with all the other conference schools.
@bclintonk, though people do watch Indiana basketball.
@northwesty, Swarthmore isn’t Haverford. Nor is it a NESCAC school.
Even within DIII, emphasis on sports may differ a good deal between schools.
For example, both Caltech and Williams are DIII, but how much the 2 schools care about sports and winning in sports differs quite a bit.
That is certainly news to this Swarthmore parent. The reality is more like the following: The coach nominates some applicants who are admissible but would otherwise not stand out. In other words, it is a way to take some applicants who might or might not be admitted absent the hook, and give them a high likelihood of getting in. (By the way, a couple of years ago, the average GPA on our D’s team was 3.6.)
Here are some numbers concerning Duke’s and Stanford’s men’s basketball teams. For the period considered, Duke had an average SAT of 968 (out of 1600). Stanford had an average of 1123. I profoundly doubt that Swarthmore would admit a single player with an SAT that low. http://blogs.mercurynews.com/collegesports/2008/11/05/stanford-vs-duke-basketball-the-difference-in-admissions-standards/ There is just no comparison in terms of the concessions made to admit athletes at DI schools.
One of my colleague’s son, claim to fame is that he once scored 3-4 touchdowns against CalTech while playing for a SoCal LAC…I had to remind him that I was not quite sure that rose to the level of a “bragging right”–wink.
Are you aware that not only can URMs read, but that they read these threads? And not just adults, but kids? I have no words for how ugly and racist that statement is.
^ not to mention, completely inaccurate.
Schools may have the stats to show that even though the admitted athletes are a point or two below other admitted freshmen, the athletes succeed at the same or even a higher rate. Maybe the history shows athletes don’t drop out as often, don’t have the mental health or physical illnesses at the same rate as others, attend class more often.
My daughter’s coach keeps a pretty good eye on DD’s grades. Last week she wanted to know why DD had missed 6 physics classes (DD had gone to another session and it wasn’t recorded correctly). DD had a good first semester,but second semester was rough. I’m not sure she would have returned to this school without her sport.
If schools wanted to fill their rosters with only those with high stats, they could. Admissions officers see the value that other activities give the student. If this sports thing wasn’t working, it would have been elimated a long time ago. Not recruiting works at Caltech so if other schools want to take that route they certainly can.
A few years ago my daughter’s school searches for a new president. There were two candidates, one who wanted to grow sports, including adding football, one who didn’t want football. Well, the football guy was selected, but the other guy came as an assistant. Guy two is now the president and admits that the addition of football (and other sports) has improved the school.
The U-M Athletic Department has a $150+ million budget and it runs at a surplus (so revenue outpaces expenses).
Wow, this constant kvetching about the evil of DI college sports is hilarious. Please continue to call for all right thinking people to end D1 sports and replace it with the joys of DIII! Until then, I plan on enjoying the Florida-Georgia game this weekend with my friends and family. 
“The coach nominates some applicants who are admissible but would otherwise not stand out.”
Right. The D3 coach gets a limited number (i.e. a budget) of “nudges” that he can cash in at the admissions office. Those nudges result in “qualified” recruited athletes getting admitted. Quite unlikely that most of those “qualified” athletes would get in without the nudge from the coach.
Same thing happens at Williams, Harvard, Stanford and Oklahoma State. Kids get in as athletes when they wouldn’t get in as non-athletes. It is just that the standards applied differ in all those cases (as I said above).
I don’t hate college sports at all. I’m fine with them. I only make the point that it isn’t just big money Alabama that cares about sports and which changes its standards to accommodate sports. The sanctimonious Ivies care about sports a lot and bend their standards for sports. So do the sanctimonious academically elite D3s. They all have the sports disease, just different strains.
Sports are deeply woven into colleges at all levels and always will be. Your head will explode if you read up on how the football programs at HYP (and especially Chicago) were operated back in the early 1900s. Those stories make today’s big money NCAA scandals seem quaint.
True. Sort of. Indiana basketball is popular in Indiana, but it doesn’t have anything like the national following that Michigan football has. It’s a “big name” program alright, but college basketball just doesn’t draw that big a TV audience, except during March Madness. A high-profile match-up like Indiana-Louisville might attract 1.5 million viewers. But last year, for example, Indiana-Butler had a TV viewership of only 500,000. You’d think that would be an attractive match-up–the schools are in the same state, Indiana the longtime basketball power, Butler the upstart with recent success. But it turns out only half a million people cared to watch it, most of them in Indiana, I’d wager. That’s a far cry from the 5.3 million viewers Michigan football averages per game.
My impression is that, at least in the Big Ten, basketball broadcast rights are thrown in almost as a “freebie” in the conference’s contracts with the TV networks. The Big Ten gets $100 million/year from ESPN and $112 million/year from the Big Ten Network for rights to broadcast both football and basketball (and the conference might earn additional money from BTN as a 49% equity owner of the network). But it’s football that makes the most money for the networks. Basketball just gives them low-cost content to fill up their endless hours of airtime. Evidence for this? Well, the American Athletic Conference, a basketball-heavy conference made up of remnants of the Big East and Conference USA, has a football-basketball contract with ESPN that brings in only $18 million/year, despite featuring some big-name basketball programs like UConn, Cincinnati, Memphis, and until recently Louisville. And the Big Ten has a basketball-only contract with CBS that must bring in less than $18 million/year, because it doesn’t make my source’s list of largest college sports TV contracts. Even the NCAA basketball tournament brings in only about $13 million/year on average for the Big Ten.
@northwesty, you still haven’t acknowledged that not even all DIII schools treat athletes the same way.
For example, a nudge from a coach (outside of crew) at MIT is worth less than a nudge from a coach at Williams (and far far less than a nudge from a coach at Harvard). In fact, a nudge from a (non-crew) coach at MIT is almost worthless (while it is worthless at Caltech).
And yes, football in large part helped to build both the U of Chicago and the Ivy League.
Let’s suppose that a Swarthmore applicant with a 1300 would be “unlikely” to get in without the coach’s support and a Stanford athlete with an 1100 would be unlikely to get in without a coach’s support. Yet, both get in with support. If you conclude from this that Swarthmore is bending standards as much to admit athletes, you are stretching credibility. The fact remains that one school is admitting athletes who would still be admissible without the hook while the other is stretching far lower. And the fact that athletes represent a larger fraction of one school than the other says absolutely nothing about standards.
@bclintonk, however, look at the Big East basketball TV contract (granted, Fox may be regretting handing that out, though).
Average of a little over $40M a year. And IU is a much bigger bball brand than any of them besides Georgetown.
The American got such a pitiful deal possibly because everyone expects their most attractive schools to be raided off eventually.
BTW, if you look at the total TV value of college basketball, it is actually comparable to college football (it’s at least in the same league). However, a big chunk of the TV value of college basketball is in the NCAA tourney, and the NCAA captures a big chunk of that; March Madness essentially funds the entire NCAA (and spreads the rest to a trillion different schools). Which is why football drives the bus at football power conferences. But IU basketball definitely contributes.