<p>tom:</p>
<p>your post is for ALL sports offered by a college/Uni, i.e., only a handful are 100% in the black, i.e., football + mens basketball + donations cover 100% of the costs of ALL sports offered by the Uni. Every other college subsidizes its athletic department.</p>
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<p>Don’t forget, for every football scholarship is a women’s scholarship. Cutting football scholarships could result in the elimination of women’s sports, as well.</p>
<p>^^ Schmaltz,</p>
<p>I don’t fault Title IX. Every intercollegiate men’s sport loses money, too, except football (at BCS conference schools) and basketball. I have no problem with saying schools should spend as much on women’s athletics as men’s. But if a school is strapped for cash, the last thing it should do is go after the football program because that’s where the positive revenue comes from. </p>
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<p>Cutting football scholarships by 10% or thereabouts would have a trivial effect on the bottom line. The average FBS school spends about $35 million on intercollegiate athletics, of which about $8.5 million is spent on football. Athletic scholarships represent about 15% of the total expenses, of which 9% goes to male athletes and 6% to women—so let’s say roughly $5 million/year for all athletic scholarships across all sports, men’s and women’s combined. The rest goes for things like coaches’ salaries, facilities, equipment, team travel, medical costs, and game expenses. Even if you cut athletic scholarships in all sports by 10%, you’d save on average something like $500K per year. Cutting 10% in football alone might save you something like $200K/yr. And remember, a chunk of that scholarship money goes to pay the student-athlete’s tuition, so the nominal “savings” in the athletic budget would be partially offset by reduced revenue to the university’s general fund.</p>
<p>I want football scholarships cut so that prestige programs do not stockpile players. Less scholarships helps spread the talent. I want as much competition as possible.</p>
<p>I would exempt football from Title IX which should help with non-revenue male sports.</p>
<p>Revenue sports are completely different from non-revenue sports. It’s a shame they are all lumped together.</p>
<p>The revenue sports (football, men’s basketball, men’s ice hockey) are, in essence, minor professional sports leagues. As with other minor professional sports leagues, the best players move up to the majors after some time in the minors. To lure the best athletes for profitable winning teams, colleges bend academic requirements, offer generous scholarships, build glittering training facilities, pro-level competition facilities and posh dorms, and in some cases offer other under-the-table payoffs. The colleges can’t overtly pay the athletes, so they offer all sorts of non-salary inducements, because those players are bringing in the bucks.</p>
<p>But then, there are the other sports. Because of Title 9, whatever the colleges offer to the athletes who bring in the money has to be offered to the other athletes as well. So then the golfers and swimmers and rowers get these posh dorms and training facilities-- perquisites that are only offered to the football players because the college can’t legally pay them.</p>
<p>Some here may say, and have said, it’s all the fault of Title 9. I say, it’s the fault of the colleges, for running minor pro sports leagues with pretend students. If the colleges spun off their football and basketball teams, admitting that they were professional leagues with professional athletes, then the colleges could return to having athletes who were actually students in other sports. And they wouldn’t have to spend $128,000 per volleyball player.</p>
<p>The non-revenue sports also tend to act as minor leagues. If you watch the Olympics, you’ll notice that American athletes tend to come from the same colleges, depending on the sport. Water Polo players, for example, will often come from UCLA, Stanford or USC. Softball players will often be from UCLA or Arizona. Sprinters often come from Arkansas or Florida. Women’s soccer players come from North Carolina. These schools get those top players the same way they get the players in the revenue sports.</p>
<p>Of course, spinning off leagues in the non-revenue sports isn’t a viable option.</p>
<p>Why isn’t spinning off college football into minor leagues a viable option?</p>
<p>It’s true that in non-revenue sports, some schools have good teams with top athletes. But to call water-polo at USC and Stanford “minor league” implies that somewhere there’s Major League Water Polo. Nobody’s making money playing water polo. There are no two million dollar water polo coaches or giant TV contracts. Water polo is not the problem.</p>
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<p>Maybe because colleges don’t want to do it.</p>
<p>I’m not really sure that having a great team is that much better than having a decent one.</p>
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<p>Absolutely right, Bay, except there’s no “maybe” about it. Think about it. Schools like Michigan, Ohio State, Florida, USC and others run intercollegiate athletic programs that cost $80 to $100 million per year. The most successful of these programs are “self-financing,” which really means football (with a small boost from men’s basketball) is paying all the bills for itself and for all other intercollegiate sports. Football accounts for maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the total on the expenditure side, and upwards of 90% on the revenue side. So why would you spin off football, only to be left with $50 million of expenditures on other intercollegiate sports, and no obvious source to make up the lost revenue? Even at schools where the athletic department receives external subsidies and/or runs a deficit (like Berkeley), football is still in many cases paying a very large fraction of the bills for all other intercollegiate sports. The only way it would make financial sense for a school to spin off football is if the football program doesn’t produce enough revenue to pay its own bills–as is the case at many non-BCS-conference schools. But there’s no reason to think those programs would be financially viable as independent spin-offs, and basically you’d have a league that excluded all the strongest programs, limiting its market appeal.</p>
<p>Besides, colleges believe, rightly or wrongly, that they enjoy all sorts of intangible benefits from football: better alumni relations, stronger name recognition benefiting student recruitment, more “spirit” and solidarity among the student body, and a broader public fan base that (especially for public universities) may lead to more favorable treatment in the legislature. So if football can at least pay for itself and potentially subsidize (fully or partially) other intercollegiate athletic programs as well, it’s pretty much a no-brainer for college presidents and trustees.</p>
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<p>There are professional leagues for most of those sports. Some aren’t in this country (like Volleyball or Water Polo), and others are low-profile (like Soccer or Track and Field). The only real difference is the amount of money involved, which should be largely irrelevant.</p>
<p>The amount of money involved in college sports is assuredly relevant. It’s exactly the issue. We’ve created a perverse system where teenage football players and basketball players have to go to college and pretend to be students in order to become professional athletes. While they are at college, spectators pay millions of dollars to see them play, but they don’t get any of that money. </p>
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<p>Because then you could stop paying the $50 million. How many athletes are at Michigan, if we don’t count the football players, the mens’ hockey players and the mens’ basketball players? There are 21 teams; say each team has an average of 25 players. That’s about $100,000 per player per year. Many of those players played club sports when they were younger, where their parents paid nothing close to $100,000 per year for them to compete. I can guarantee that the club soccer players around here don’t pay that much to play, or anything close to that much.</p>
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<p>OK, just to be clear: so you’re proposing that schools like Michigan and Berkeley eliminate all NCAA intercollegiate athletics?</p>
<p>I don’t think an athletic scholarship costs the university the full cost of attendance. If UC-B is $50k for an OOS student, that students, though guaranteed a full scholarship, still completes financial aid forms and, in some if not many cases, receives Pell Grant aid, etc. The University makes up the difference.</p>
<p>None of you really understand Title IX and how the data is analyzed. The analysis calls for comparing the percentage of participants by sex in the athletics program with the percentage of each sex in the full time undergraduate student body. So if UCB has say 55% women as undergraduates they should have 55% of the athletic opportunities. If they do they are in compliance with the law. If they don’t further analysis is done to see if they are in compliance.</p>
<p>That’s not actual people btw, it’s opportunities to compete. For example, one women on the cross country, indoor track, and outdoor track counts three times. While a football player who only competes in that sport counts only once. So if you have 1000 athletic opportunities in the combined mens and womens program, then 550 of those opportunities should go to women. If you dropped everything but basketball and football for men you would have a Title IX problem because there would be a demonstrated interest by women in participating in athletics, which is a required part of the analysis. The teams dropped are proof of that. </p>
<p>Now the 550 is not an absolute number. It can be substantially less. Assuming that women are the traditionally underrepresented sex, and that there hasn’t been a marked increase in womens opportunities in the last several years, which would obviate the need to come to 550, you would look to see if there is interest an abilities for additional womens sports.</p>
<p>The Bush administration issued guidance on this matter that it so antithetical to the actual law and impenetrable that most colleges pretty much ignored it. The current administration is operating in general like the last one, which means you pretty much will not hear anything out of the Office for Civil Rights in the near future. Controversial cases that I was working on in 2004 when I retired still have not been resolved.</p>
<p>Now the analysis for the distribution of scholarship funds is different. It looks to the percentage by sex in the athletic program not the student body. So if women make up 30% of the athletes, even if they should have 55% of the athletic opportunities, they should be getting somewhere between 29-31% of the athletic financial assistance absent legitimate nondiscriminatory reasons of which there are many. In this analysis you don’t count opportunities you count real people. The one percentage standard is used because athletic departments, absent legitimate nondiscriminatory reasons, have absolute control over the issuing of athletic financial assistance.</p>
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<p>What I think CardinalFang is suggesting is that D1 sports be dropped, i.e., D3 is a whole lot cheaper since everyone is full pay.</p>
<p>tsdad:</p>
<p>your last paragraph is exactly what we are discussing, so yes, we do understand T9. (Safe harbor is safe harbor. Why spend a gazillion defending against “intent” when you can use the safe-harbor rules/guidelines.)</p>
<p>If a football program offers 85 scholarships at $30-50k per scholarship (assuming blend of instate & OOS), then women’s sports better offer that many, or at least that much funding. Of course, no women’s team is that large. Thus, scholarships are more plentiful on a per student basis on women’s teams, i.e., women’s soccer team has many more full scholarships than men’s soccer for example.</p>
<p>From the blog that was posted:</p>
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<p>Clearly, Cal Berkeley has ‘screwed the pooch’ with a plan for a facility that only benefits student-athletes. </p>
<p>As far as the overall issue goes, many schools run a net loss on sport programs and many schools hit students with fees for athletic facility use (whether they use them or not). The difference is when you impact academics when you’re not cutting back across the board. Sure, once you lose a sports program it is quite hard to build it back up, but that’s the sad reality that all bets should be off in a financial crisis. That’s just the sad reality of things.</p>
<p>You don’t have to “imagine” if the next generation of athletes didn’t get the chance! The greatest swimming program in NCAA history WAS UCLA Mens Swimming. It was killed by Title IX. All the faculty at Cal is saying is that public universities should kill all sports. perhaps what they need is a PhD thesis examining what young men and women learn by setting goals, managing time and dedicating themselves to reaching and succeeding on the National and world level. they may find that it, at least, equals what they are getting in the classroom and the anti-military rallies run by the Cal faculty.</p>
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<p>Going to class? Studying? Doing research? Taking part in public service? Turning your papers in on time? These allow all student to set goals, manage their time, and dedicate themselves to success not the small percentage of students involved in intercollegiate athletics.</p>
<p>If you want to see what individual colleges are spending on athletics go here: [Equity</a> in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool Website](<a href=“http://ope.ed.gov/athletics/]Equity”>Equity in Athletics)</p>
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<p>No. That is not what I’m proposing. I would have Michigan and Berkeley spin off football, basketball and in Michigan’s case hockey. The athletes on those teams would not be students, but paid professionals. Students and community members could cheer for the University of Michigan minor pro hockey team and tailgate at the Golden Bears football games.</p>
<p>The non-revenue sports would not make money for the school; they would be subsidized, as other student activities are subsidized. Title 9 would still apply. Athletic scholarships would still be given if the school chose that route. Since athletes in the non-revenue sports would not be lucrative to the school, there would not be such pressure to build $136 million Student Athlete Performance Centers to benefit 350 student athletes. Maybe then, unlike now, students studying science, engineering or computer science would be able to play varsity sports.</p>
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<p>UCLA made choices to prioritize other men’s sports over swimming. UCLA didn’t have to make those choices. They could have kept the swimming program intact.</p>