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A couple of Big Ten schools were rocked by budget stories last week that shed light on how entrenched their bloated sports departments are within universities. At the same time, it showed how empowered they seem to have.
On Wednesday, Todd Milewski from The Wisconsin State Journal released an overview of the amount of revenue the University of Wisconsin athletics department plans to lose this fiscal year due to the pandemic ($ 60 million), and then how much would accrue if there were no soccer ($ 40 million more for a total of $ 100 million).
The next day, athletic director Barry Alvarez issued a letter to Badger fans, and even more so, generous donors. Although the early release for contributions never came in the letter, it certainly sounded like a preface to one.
That same Wednesday Bloomberg business It published a story about a lawsuit filed July 17 by the union representing Rutgers’ teachers. He claims the university has ignored Freedom of Information Act requests seeking to trace the details of what it says $ 100 million was transferred from the school’s general fund to the UK’s athletics department. Rutgers declined to comment.
In his lawsuit, the chairman of the professional group said, “Rutgers Athletics has been a financial black hole for a long time, but in the past year, the university transferred over $ 100 million in total to the sports program, and they don’t want to. say why or where the money came from. “
Now, I’m not going to divide the current Rutgers Athletics Department train wreck with perhaps the biggest Big Ten success story of the past three decades, the Wisconsin athletics boom. One is the league’s endless albatross, the other is its proudest display.
But what they do have in common is this: They are empowered by a spiraling growth mindset and obsession with income generation. They are, in different ways, emblematic of a sports-industrial complex in which the academy should not be involved.
And now, instead of using the virus as a reason to breathe and examine what major college sports have become in the last two or three decades and why, and perhaps consider cutting it all down a bit, it seems inevitable that COVID simply It will be another excuse for universities to further increase fundraising and discover how to feed the beast more, at any cost. And even how to streamline playing college football during a furious pandemic.
I’m old enough to remember when college athletics departments were relative pop-n-son operations compared to what they’ve become. What changed everything was the money from network television in a big way. If I were to isolate a threshold, I would choose the late 1980s, a nexus during which the influence of cable television really began to spiral into the sky. When Disney, ESPN, and ABC joined forces, it became a rocket-powered cash infusion that hasn’t really waned.
When the members of the power conference not only began to receive exponential increases in payments, but the presidents of the universities saw how they affected the results of the schools in general, they began to give the green light to all kinds of sports expansion projects who started an arms race.
My wife has periodically asked me why I have a complete bookshelf in the basement filled with old media guides dating back three decades. I have always replied that I never know when I could refer to one of them, the content of which cannot be found online.
And here’s an example: To illustrate how athletic departments have multiplied, I went back to the dusty archives to retrieve the Penn State 2000 soccer media guide. I could have retired even further, but I wanted a benchmark that wasn’t so long ago. Here is the page that includes the photos of all the administrators of the athletics department:
Members of the Penn State Athletics Department Administration on the 2000 PSU Soccer Media Guide.
Not exactly small, but relatively straightforward job titles. Other than a surprising lack of racial diversity, nothing very remarkable.
Now, here is the same page from the 2019 media guide:
Members of the Penn State Athletic Administration represented in the 2019 PSU Soccer Media Guide.
Instead of 20 administrators, PSU now has 36, a jump of 80% in 20 years. And some of the job descriptions, well, you can search for yourself. So much more is about making money in sports than simply serving the interests and well-being of the “student athletes” who are the product.
Much of the athletic support staff is not even shown here. PSU athletics has a department called Creative Services and Brand Management that was practically non-existent in 2000, certainly not as it is now. Includes 14 people only. The marketing department has nine employees. The sports property department that attracts sponsors has 12.
And the football-only support staff, not counting James Franklin or any of his assistants, is number 26. There are six recruiting coordinators. Three video coordinators.
This is not to join Penn State because some of the other Big Ten departments are even bigger and more extensive, with increasingly cryptic titles. Every Olympic sport seems to have not only a head coach and several assistants, but also an Operations Director.
Álvarez, the former Wisconsin soccer coach and recently his athletic director, certainly remembers a time when none of this existed. He grew up in Washington County, Pennsylvania and played linebacker in Nebraska with Bob Devaney so long ago (1965-67) that Joe Paterno was rising to replace Rip Engle as head coach of Penn State.
Alvarez and former AD Pat Richter are the two main reasons why Wisconsin football became a laugh when it reached a powerhouse in 1990 today. He built it with sticks, pebbles, and sawdust and deserves all the credit he gets.
But he seems to have lost contact with those roots as much as anyone. He limited his letter to the Badger brothers warning with all kinds of ominous language that Wisconsin athletics might not enjoy what it is used to:
The reality is that this financial crisis threatens our ability to maintain the success we have celebrated. It threatens our pride in what we have built. Threatens our position in college athletics
I think we will reach a monumental crossroads in the coming days. We will have two options: stay at the head of the class or stay behind. Everything we pride ourselves on – competing at the highest level, developing world-class student athletes, and lifting trophies – is based on our ability to financially support our student athletes.
What gives me hope is that, like Badgers, our strength has always been in our people and our willingness to work towards a common goal. That fuels my belief that we can overcome this tremendous challenge and EMERGATE STRONGER THAN EVER.
Complete letter from Barry Alvarez to “fellow badgers”.
What does that mean exactly? Sounds like a prelude to a big emergency fundraiser for me. I have to stay huge.
But has bigger really meant better for college football? Do you enjoy sports now more than 10 or 20 years ago or, if you are old enough, 40 years ago? Is going to a game really as enjoyable as it used to be?
Have the hundreds of millions profits in the last decade for many Power Five trades really been more beneficial for players who have never seen a penny?
I don’t want to see anyone lose their job. But it seems this is a time of reckoning for a business that has been out of control for many years.
At least in the case of Penn State, its athletic department has always been self-sufficient. In contrast to Rutgers and many other FBS shows, she has earned every penny of her income and has not diverted any of the school’s general fund to pay her bills.
But considering what awaits everyone in this country, it might be time for all great college athletes to accept a haircut and strive to get by with less. Maybe you can find a creative loan agreement to close the gap and keep all employees, even if it weren’t for what they’ve been doing.
The business has demanded more, more, more for many years. And ordering a public brochure now, whether outdoors or under cover, just to keep the machine running at its usual RPM, just doesn’t seem right to me. In fact, it sounds as deaf as it could be.
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