College sports ‘arms race' not sustainable, say university presidents

The commission said the presidents blamed most of the problems on "excessive" salaries for football and basketball coaches and noted that salvaging college athletics could come down to dumping some sports programs in sacrifice.

"They believe there is a problem and that something needs to be done about it," Rick Hesel, principal with Art & Science Group, said of the presidents' responses. "But they are not sanguine for positive change."

The reason for their pessimism: money and competition.

The majority of the university presidents said their individual athletic programs were sustainable, but concluded that other schools in their division -- indeed in the nation -- could not survive on their current paths and were essentially "cooking the books," said Hesel, whose company aided in compiling the Knight study.

To right the ship, universities would need some oversight authority make the industry play by the same rules, the presidents told the commission. While they would like to push those changes through themselves, that isn't possible with the disparate interests of alumni, boosters, politicians and commercial entities like television and sponsors invested in the industry.

College sports can be prolific money-makers, even in a struggling economy. According to value analysis by Forbes magazine, the football program at the University of Texas, runner-up in the national championship game last week, generated $82 million last season. The program at Alabama, which defeated the Longhorns in that game, topped out at $92 million.

Coaches are becoming rich men. According to a salary analysis by USA Today of the 120 coaches in Division I, at least 25 coaches made $2 million or more in total income last season. Nine of them made $3 million or more.

University presidents who have tried to bring sports programs into fiscal line have done so at their own peril, Hesel said. The presidents were granted confidentiality to entice them to speak freely to the commission, Hesel said.

"One president of a very, very successful football institution said, ‘We'll get to the point where we literally can't do it,' " Hesel said. " ‘And we're one of the rich schools. TV contracts won't continue to grow and money will cut itself off. We're going the way of NASCAR, which priced itself out of its market by building too many training facilities and the like.' "

Another president told the commission, "The problem is it is such big money. It's an arms race that is self-perpetuating," according to Hesel.

The idea of cutting sports programs worries Nancy Hogshead-Makar because it could impact women's athletics. She said the dominant culture in college sports regards the financial survival of football and men's basketball as an imperative. Women's programs that were facilitated by Title IX, which helped pave the way for sports equality for women in education, are viewed as baggage.

"What they're really saying is that really only men's football and basketball spending is sustainable if they cut other sports," said Hogshead-Makar, director of the Legal Advocacy Center for Women in Sports. "Undoubtedly Title IX will be seen as the cause of all the costs.

"This makes it very difficult for women to participate in athletics."

J. Douglass Toma, an associate professor at the University of Georgia's Institute of Higher Education, argued that athletics is critical to college culture and that the problem is not spending, but where to draw the line.

Athletics give local colleges a national brand, connect with local residents who are not able to relate to the institution in other ways and people affiliate with schools because of their teams' distinctiveness, Toma said.

"The form that culture takes is often associated with athletics," he said. "Think about the songs, think about the symbols, think about the rituals and the ceremonies that occur on a large college campus. They almost always have something to do with athletics."