News Journal: College sports causes more losers than winners

You might remember “follow the money” from Watergate days, but it is still useful advice when you want to know what an institution’s real priorities are.

College football, and to a lesser extent college basketball, are awash in money. “If you were ever looking for a recession-proof business,” Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported, “you wouldn’t need a college degree to see that football is a no-brainer. … The revenue increase in football from [the top 10] schools: from less than $300 million (in 2000) to more than $759 million a decade later.”

Success gets rewarded big time. Auburn and Oregon each received about $2.3 million for playing in the 2011 BCS bowl national championship game. I’m sure the teams that played this year did even better.

If you found all of the recent realignments of athletic conferences confusing, just follow the flood of money the media is pouring into big-time college football programs. New Jersey’s Rutgers moved into the traditionally Midwestern Big Ten, for example, because it gave that powerful conference better access to the major New York and Philadelphia markets. It was a windfall for Rutgers, but it means extra revenue for Ohio State and Michigan as well.

So what is Rutgers going to do with that extra cash? Maybe build an extra court for the tennis team? Maybe a new chemistry lab or a modest pay increase for a history professor? Wrong. It is axing six minor sports programs. The athletic director pointed out that costs of all the school’s athletic programs had doubled during his tenure. When you spend $12.5 million for a new football training center, $175,000 a season to put the team up at a local hotel before home games, and pay the coach more than $1 million a year, you have to cut somewhere, right? Nobody pays to watch your volleyball team.

Rutgers is hardly the worst example of cutting back to support a football program. As Huffington Post reported, “Temple University’s announcement that it’s going from 24 sports to 17 this fall, a move that will eventually save about $3-3.5 million a year, was just the latest in a growing line of colleges and universities that are reshaping overextended athletic programs by shuttering smaller sports to help make those that remain – particularly those designed to bring in revenue – more competitive.”

Follow the money. The highest paid public employee in 40 of our 50 states is either a football of basketball coach. According to a Bloomberg News study, in the 100 top college athletic powers, inflation-adjusted academic spending per student rose a modest 8 percent from 2005 to 2011 while athletic spending per student athlete rose by more than 38 percent? “In 2011,” said Bloomberg, “median academic spending per student at these schools was $13,736, while athletic spending per athlete was seven times as much – $96,938.”

We often joked in Washington that, if we gave the Pentagon an unlimited budget, they would find a way to exceed it. That’s what’s happening in major college sports, where more revenue triggers even more spending. Today, as colleges collectively throw hundreds of millions of dollars into what Bloomberg aptly calls the arms race to be competitive in football and basketball, even at the expense of other sports and even academic programs, most of them end up losing money. According to USA Today, “At a time of tight budgets throughout higher education, even the nation’s few financially self-sufficient major-college athletics departments are continuing to receive subsidies in the form of student fees, school or state support. Just 23 of 228 athletics departments at NCAA Division I public schools generated enough money on their own to cover their expenses in 2012.”

That 2011 BCS Championship bowl game? After accounting for all of the costs associated with their appearances, Oregon lost $300,000 and Auburn $600,000.

The problem extends well beyond top Division 1 teams. The Washington Post recently told its readers: “This isn’t a joke. The University of District of Columbia, which was desperate to cut costs, is eliminating 17 low-enrolled academic programs – including physics, history and economics – but is keeping for now an NCAA Division II athletics program that cost $3 million more last year than it generated in revenue.”

We call ourselves a sports-crazy nation, and maybe crazy is the right word. You would think some cooler heads would find a way to end an arms race that has so few winners and many, many losers – including minor sports and academic programs.

All I know is spending $212,000 a year per football player (as Auburn does) and less than $15,000 a year on the median academic student is not the right priority to create long-term American competitiveness in the global marketplace.

Former U.S. Sen. Ted Kaufman writes a column each Sunday.