“In 19 of our 21 sports we lose about $2 million a year. Total revenue for the 19 sports last year was $175,000.”
— USC athletic director Pat Haden
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“In 19 of our 21 sports we lose about $2 million a year. Total revenue for the 19 sports last year was $175,000.”
— USC athletic director Pat Haden
Not an unusual stat considering the plight of most non-revenue sports on college campuses and the impact of Title IX in the need to spread scholarships equally among men and women’s teams. It does raise the issue though of the haves and have nots in the college football playoff where non-Power 5 conferences now may have even less access to the playoff and consequently may see new TV contracts for their conferences lose their value during renewals. Many of the smaller FBS schools are now even considering dropping football because it doesn’t turn a profit anymore. So while USC, UCLA and Texas of the world can rake in the money, are we building an unsustainable model where college athletics are only going to be defined by the bottom line? For private schools like USC it’s less of an issue, but for publics like UCLA it’s becoming crucial as they tackle budget reductions. I mean, the UCs are now putting a cap on in-state guarantees and instead turning to more internationals and out of state to get the 100% full ride in tuition to help meet costs. At what point does a faculty or student body start objecting to football coaches and assistant coaches getting multi-million dollar payouts as budgets collapse for academics? Maybe I’m being naive, but I think there is going to be a reckoning coming money wise.
Common sense intelligently presented.
For example, Sarks contract is worth more than 5 – 7 tenured USC professors combined.
Yet, in the course of those “Professors’ careers their impact on the future of their students success is 25 times greater than Sarks limited FB leadership.
Depends on the professor’s area of teaching/research whether the output is greater or lessor.
Point taken, but however a Professors’ expertise is tilted (teaching vs research) the Professor is the core of an academic program.
Make a choice: USC FB NC or a USC Professor wins the Nobel Prize, in say, Biology. Which person in the future will impart the most to their students.
Like you would know what goes on in a university classroom? I’m not sure who has more of a delusional life; you claiming to have all this academic experience at a top tier academic institution or your twin sister Charlie Bucket claiming to have caught crabs at a USC sorority house.
Too bad the Cerritos College dropout didn’t make it far enough to learn the difference between common and proper nouns
Common noun > veritas the klown.
Golly-Nerd is quite the stickler for protocol at the Comic Con Conventions competitions also.
You’d be the crab to know!
Actually, I didn’t mean teaching vs. research. I meant the subject. To be frank, a lot of courses are a waste of student’s time.
How many great researchers are also great teachers?
That’s a question I’ll leave for the experts.
Two different skills, very infrequently shared bu one person.
Hey bruin rob, you making a statement about common sense and intelligence is a bigger oxymoron than your waist size.
One vote for Sark.
his waist size is an oxymoron? This I gotta hear – explain.
Football rarely ever loses money for any college. What loses money is the matching Title IX Scholarships. Men’s Basketball rarely ever loses money for any college. What loses money is the matching scholarships. I could note the laughable situation where sports that have a preponderance of minority males are footing the bill for sports that are overwhelmingly white.
But we should also be accurate. The cost to the school for attendance of athletes is not the same as the dollar value put on the scholarship, particularly at private schools.
The traditional way of dealing with the non revenue sports (beyond limiting them and putting them on a non scholarship basis) has been to spend a lot of effort in building a strong athletic alumni base to get booster revenue (like Stanford, who has a half billion dollar athletic endowment).
The other option is to work harder to bring in revenues not just from the revenue sports (which is why basketball sucking and some of the issues with P12 bowl tie ins are problematic). It is to emphasize marketing for borderline sports such as women’s basketball, baseball, soccer, and track. The SEC has made some strides in that direction.
Not really related, but it would be great for non scholarship athletes to have a NCAA or conference-wide tuition (for baseball, with its partial scholarship set up, and maybe across the board) to stop the discrepancy between costs for non scholarship athletes who go to private schools and public schools.
And it would be great to stop penalizing football and men’s basketball by cutting down the number of matching scholarships for women under Title IX for these programs.
yes, SC’s woes are due to those pesky women athletes.
Let’s see 19 of 21 sports are losing about $ 2,000,000 and SoCal is paying their A.D. about $ 2,000,000. What if….. Naw, nevermind, that’ll never work.
Common sense at Klown U. Not very likely.
Did anyone expect women’s softball or basketball to make money?– Or men’s track or baseball, for that matter?
And what is $2 million to a school like SC when the football t.v. revenue alone is more than 10-fold that.
Time to rid the Men Volleyball team of the entire coaching staff at season’s end. They have lost complete control of the team.
When is Klown U’s first game in this years NCAA Basketball Tournament scheduled? Is Klown U favored?
As I mentioned before, the impact of college athletics on public school budgets can be much more adverse, which is why UCLA and Cal have struggled to juggle competing academic demands on campus (namely faculty pension benefits) with the need to hire more expensive coaching staffs (see Mora & assistants and Alford buyout). In UCLA’s case, with the turnouts at the new Pauley running far lower than projects, basketball will not generate the profits it once did which places the non-revenue sports at risk. So the question comes into play for schools like UCLA, do you favor reducing salaries for assistant coaches for example vs. eliminating a non-revenue sport like gymnastics? How much does winning take precedence over the “student-athlete”? I think that dilemma is now being faced by a lot of schools outside of the Power 5 and I think we’re all the poorer for those kinds of trade offs.