<p>Top football coaches worth high pay.
<a href=“http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/Football-coaches-salaries.pdf”>http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/Football-coaches-salaries.pdf</a></p>
<p>If Rutgers is at least competitive NJ has more than enough fans to support the program. Maybe not to the level of Ohio St, Michigan or Penn St but they can easily pull enough fans to fill a 50-60,000 capacity stadium.</p>
<p>Competitive is different when you have an Ohio State, Michigan, PSU, and Iowa, Illinois, and others coming through your conference schedule. But if they can begin to compete with some of these schools, I agree that their fan base and ticket sales should rise. Not sure how its been the past 7-8 years, although when I’ve seen them play at home on TV it always looked like they had decent fan support. </p>
<p>nm</p>
<p>On average Rutgers should be able to compete with Purdue, NW, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Maryland. They should be able to win some times against Iowa, Nebraska and Penn St. A few years ago I would have said Michigan State but right now they are hot. Michigan has been down and the OSU is out of their league.</p>
<p>I won’t lie, as a Midwesterner it feels bizarre to have UMD and Rutgers in the conference. I suspect that where college admissions is concerned, people in this area will keep using the phrase “Big Ten” to mean the Midwestern universities.</p>
<p>I agree. It is a shame they never created a true Northeastern conference when Penn St tried. We ended up with the eastern schools in 3 conferences where they really are not a match.</p>
<p>Although Rutgers should benefit in many ways having ended up in the BIG.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s a gamble that has already cost too much and it should be stopped. Also, sprawling Pennsylvania is culturally different from densely populated, industrial New Jersey, which is part of the Northeast megalopolis. It’s not in the middle of nowhere and there are plenty of other distractions. College football isn’t going to be the unifying focus of campus life here.</p>
<p>NJ exports students because it is of small area and densely populated, between two large metropolitan areas (NYC and Philly). Most NJ students still attend college within 75 miles of home.</p>
<p>RE the thread title question: there are many ways to make a university academically stronger that don’t involve funding a speculative boondoggle of an athletic program. Direct expenditure on academics seems more efficient if academic improvement is the goal.</p>
<p>I think USC’s winning years helped it move from being “University of Spoiled Children” to a high ranking highly selective univ. Happy alumni means bigger donations. Winning teams brings in more applications.</p>
<p>Plus, you can’t beat the free publicity schools get when their names are frequently mentioned on TV and in newspapers.</p>
<p>Now, with several ESPN channels and other sports networks (which are often on TV at restaurants), these big Div I schools are getting constant exposure. Turn on ESPN and within a few minutes you are seeing all the big Div I schools mentioned either directly or on the crawlers. </p>
<p>It wasn’t that long ago that Bama was only getting 8000 apps per year. Now it is getting over 30,000 apps per year. Last year’s frosh class was 60% OOS. Don’t know what this year’s numbers are…likely higher.</p>
<p>While the app numbers can’t compare with the crazy number of apps that a school like UCLA gets, but heck the state of Alabama only has a population of 5million people (Calif population 38 million)</p>
<p>NJSue. The BIG membership will provide RU with about $35-$40 Million in just shared tv revenue when they get their full share. Most of the costs are sunk and not really relevant. If they can’t make money going forward it’s their problem. And the returns for extra academic spending are even more difficult to capture. UVa treid to improve their science areas and even with their wealth found it uneconomic and dropped the plan.</p>
<p>One of the most prominent examples in recent years was Butler University, which established a national profile through its basketball team’s success. The college or university needs to have more going for it than a successful sports franchise, nevertheless, or the boost will only lead to a temporary spike in admissions. MIT and CalTech have never suffered for want of qualified applicants, nor have Pomona, Swarthmore, and Reed.</p>
<p>If there is any cause and effect relationship between sports success and academics, I suspect it lies almost entirely in increased national exposure and the ensuing application cycles. For example, many kids around the country who would never have looked into Maryland before started doing so (and applying) after the Terps won the NCAA tournament in 2002. </p>
<p>Bigger applicant pool = better admitted class, more selective, more OOS tuition, etc.</p>
<p>I would say Stanford has overshadowed MIT and CT partially due to winning D-1 sports. I think it heps attract a more socially adept well-rounded type that does well in business after school.</p>
<p>Cal Tech is very very small compared to Stanford and MIT. Don’t know if they have the numbers to field teams. </p>
<p>Athletic ability also doesn’t factor in to admissions to Caltech at all.</p>
<p>Caltech has 17 D-III varsity teams. Coaches don’t have much admissions sway, but they certainly recruit. I have a student in touch with a Caltech coach this year.</p>
<p>The business/academic justification is that college sports are the “front porch” of the university. A relatively unimportant ancillary part of the structure. But very visible and the part that applicants, alumni, the community and others often interact with.</p>
<p>Notre Dame stays a small regional college in Indiana without football. Same with USC. Duke likely does not crack the USNWR top ten for national universities without basketball. Lots of examples of this – Alabama football, Indiana basketball. Look at all the branding that Oregon has gotten in the past few years from its fashionably outfitted football team.</p>
<p>The combination of big time sports and higher education is quite strange – that combo does not exist in any country except the U.S. But it has been around for over 100 years and, for better or worse, is deeply woven into U.S. higher ed. Other than U of Chicago or NYU or MIT, university presidents need to care about sports. </p>
<p>“I agree with you. Its also remarkable that you can’t convince any of those people that Tufts, Williams, or Amherst is as good or better than fill-in-the-blank local or regional school that they know about.”</p>
<p>Sports are HUGE at those three schools. Close to 40% of Williams students are varsity athletes. Even in no scholarship D3, college sports is dominant part of the university model. </p>
<p>Williams has 884 varsity roster spots in its athletic department with an enrollment of only 2,000. That’s more athletes than there are at Alabama, Florida, LSU or Texas. It is actually stunning how much even academically selectively schools invest in sports. The Ivy League schools have gigantic athletic departments, even though they have opted out of the big money BCS type of programs. </p>
<p>^^
wow…884 spots? Do they have many students playing more than one sport?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’ve always wondered why that is. In the U.S., collegiate sports began as friendly pickup games between students who wanted to have some fun and let off steam; gradually evolving into more organized contests between neighboring schools, and eventually mushrooming into what we have today. It seems like a pretty natural thing to happen… don’t students everywhere enjoy sports of some sort, and need some physical outlet after sitting in class all day? Why has this never happened anywhere else?</p>