@CO 44Editorial Drop Cap:College sports, and especially college football, could hardly be considered endangered in the United States, particularly in the South. It seems nothing — not weather or war or economic crisis — can long or greatly affect Americans’ enthusiasm for campus athletics.
What is in jeopardy, say presidents of many big-money sports schools, is the sustainability of the current system in the face of competitive pressures on one side and economic realities on the other.
A study issued Monday by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics reports that college presidents generally favor dramatic changes to control soaring athletic costs, but feel powerless to enact them.
“Presidents have lost their jobs over athletics,” said one campus executive, quoted in a Chronicle of Higher Education summary of the Knight report. “Presidents and chancellors are afraid to rock the boat with boards, benefactors, and political supporters who want to win, so they turn their focus elsewhere.”
Any of this sound familiar?
A bit of background: The Knight Commission, created in 1989, is a special project of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (long familiar in this community). It was formed, according to the commission’s Web site, “to recommend a reform agenda that emphasized academic values in an arena where commercialization of college sports often overshadowed the underlying goals of higher education.”
Twenty years later, the situation has only gotten worse. Coaches’ salaries are, most presidents and other higher education executives agree, “excessive” and, in a time of economic crunch, increasingly unaffordable, especially in football and basketball.
The competitive pressure to attract or retain those coaches creates what the college administrators said is a widening cultural divide between sports and academics, especially on those campuses where athletic departments are lavishly funded and academic programs are struggling to survive. To put that rift in a dollars perspective, the Knight study reports that the median operating budget in Division I-A athletics departments increased by 46 percent between 2004-2008.
Even so, and even in the face of tightening budgets, administrators are reluctant to cut back. Said one: “Show me a president who won’t meet the demands of a winning coach who has the chance to walk out the door for a higher salary someplace else.”
Television delivers bags of money to these schools (note ESPN’s contract with the Southeastern Conference), but the presidents say even TV money can’t keep up with athletic inflation enough to make the system sustainable. “We’ll get to the point where we literally can’t do it,” one president told the commission. “And we’re one of the rich schools. TV contracts won’t continue to grow. The money will cut itself off.”
Eventually, something has to give.
Our passion for college sports is a great American tradition and one of the joys of this culture. That passion isn’t the problem. Our problem is one of priorities and perspective.
— Dusty Nix, for the editorial board
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