NY Times article on role of big-time atheletics
Interesting, straightforward review of costs & benefits that motivate big-time college athletic programs, replete with a CHART.
Link: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/do-big-time-sports-mean-bi…
January 27th, 2012 at 11:16 AM ^
Interesting article, but the last paragraph seems a little off to me. Sure, Paterno wouldn't have had the power and public stature that he did if he were, say, an academic department chair. However, the same scandal could have taken place and been almost as damaging to the school.
January 27th, 2012 at 11:32 AM ^
I respectfully disagree. There would have been about 10 times less media coverage had it been some no-name academic department chair.
EDIT: I calculated that number with a series of complex formulae derived by yours truly. Don't bother arguing against it.
January 27th, 2012 at 11:50 AM ^
but the Catholic church scandal didn't originally involve any celebrity figures. Most of that centered around mostly unheard-of administrators and definitely unknown priests, and still got a ton of press coverage that I'm sure they're still fighting against daily.
It might not have been a nuclear explosion like it was with athletics involved, but I'm sure it would have a lot of the same effects with the reputation of the university, alums being pissed, ect.
January 27th, 2012 at 12:00 PM ^
True. We'll have to wait and see what happens to their football program though. It may take a long time to recover it's image, and as the article points out, that is pretty devastating to the university.
January 27th, 2012 at 12:07 PM ^
Compare the thesis of this article -- that big-time collegiate sports programs are extremely expensive and so expensive that even some FBS programs operate at a deficit -- with the thesis of some of the other linked articles and some other New York Times columns -- that there is so much money in the general pool of college athletics that the athletes ought to get some of it.
One thing does not support the other. Indeed, this article seems to argue against what Times columnist Joe Noera had been ranting about just a couple of weeks ago; that college athletes need their own union, a payscale and a salary cap!?!
Leave it to the New York Times; they could fuck up a train wreck. Whatever happens in the future of collegiate athletics, let's hope the New York Times has nothing to do with it.
January 27th, 2012 at 1:03 PM ^
Forget the Freep. Bigger and better targets remain.
January 27th, 2012 at 1:41 PM ^
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. lol.
Seriously, what is up with the New York Times and college sports lately? Have they figured out what everybody else in the newspaper biz has, that almost nothing drives page-hits like college football? I count about a half-dozen articles, columns and posts just about the business and financing of college football in the last couple of weeks. I'm not even counting the individual stories about Penn State, etc. Although they always seem to work the unrelated-wrongdoing-outliers like PSU, Miami and OSU into any story about the routine finances of other programs.
January 27th, 2012 at 6:19 PM ^
I think there are four things going on here with the NYT recent spate of critical articles about college sports.
1. College sports scandals have been front-page stuff for much of the year, along with minor outrages like the bball player from St. Joe's. That's led NYT editors to assign broader, "the view from 10,000 feet" articles on big-time college sports at large that take longer to write.
2. Also Taylor Branch's article, which made a broad-scale argument that the NCAA created the idea of the "student-athlete" to evade basic New Deal era protections in the workplace , and that college athletes are a class of workers robbed of basic labor rights - most prominently the freedom of movement and the freedom to contract - was a big deal in the establishment media and had a similar effect on editors in assigning broader stories. (Everyone's concentrated on the "being paid" part of Branch's article when the real argument is about the NCAA subverting basic economic rights.)
3. Since Joe Nocera's taken over a bi-weekly op-ed column, he's focused on college sports. I have no way of knowing this, but I think Branch's article, and particularly its arguments about the NCAA's violation of economic rights, struck home particularly for Nocera, since he was formerly business and economics correspondent for the NYT.
4. The rising cost of tuition is becoming an increasingly salient political issue (as we saw today) and editors and reporters are out for easy sources of rising tuition rates. [This is fundamentally wrong-headed, except at exceptional cases like Rutgers. The real driver of tuition increases is the explosion of non-faculty managerial positions in universities and the easy access to college loan money].
January 27th, 2012 at 6:21 PM ^
Very nicely put.
January 27th, 2012 at 12:26 PM ^
Just look at TCU and their recent football success.
"If applications are an indicator, more and more young people want to attend TCU -- including record numbers from outside Texas. A decade ago, some 5,000 potential students applied to TCU. But a record 19,000 have applied to attend for the upcoming fall semester, said Ray Brown, the dean of admission."
January 27th, 2012 at 12:43 PM ^
I bet they get a lot more out of state applicants that they can make more money on too!
January 27th, 2012 at 1:38 PM ^
TCU is private, IIRC, so in-state/out-of-state doesn't matter.
January 27th, 2012 at 5:05 PM ^
The real problem is money in college athletics. Millions and millions in tv revenue and marketing, for football factories where the scholarship athletes are no longer students at all. Coddled, quasi-professional jocks aiming for the NFL, and behaving like they were already a gangsta members of the Ravens or the Raiders.
Like Yale, for instance:
When, I ask, are we going to rein in the abuses of the Ivy League?