OT: college athletic departments financial state

[billiken_roy]

great series of articles in the friday usa today about college athletic departments struggling to stay financially solvent here are a couple of the better links:

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/men...ies-cover_N.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/201...subsidies_N.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/201...subsidies_N.htm

[bonwich]

OT? I think not.

At Kansas, the men's basketball players took a few more trips by bus instead of plane this season.

According to several studies, including one co-written by the now-White House budget director Peter Orszag— in his previous life as a Brookings Institution fellow — for every $1 a school pays to build its athletic program, it gets $1 back in new revenue. In other words, with rare exceptions, spending more on a football or men's basketball program does not yield increases in alumni giving, net operating revenue, winning or academic quality.

[Quality Is Job 1]

According to several studies, including one co-written by the now-White House budget director Peter Orszag— in his previous life as a Brookings Institution fellow — for every $1 a school pays to build its athletic program, it gets $1 back in new revenue. In other words, with rare exceptions, spending more on a football or men's basketball program does not yield increases in alumni giving, net operating revenue, winning or academic quality.

That seems both contradictory and counterintuitive.

[bonwich]

That seems both contradictory and counterintuitive.

Not at all. It means that the extra spending is a net wash -- you gain revenue, but no more revenue than what you invested.

The only counterintuitive part might be that if you spend more, you win more. But consider that if you take it in the aggregate rather than for individual cases, it probably does end up a wash there as well. As in: The total amount spent on coaches' salaries for, say, the top 200 D1 teams in the past decade has probably (I'm guessing) doubled on a real basis. Those same 200 teams, in the aggregate, won just about the same number of games (some had their records improve, some declined). The universe of coaches got richer, but it basically boils down to an arms race.