Everybody Wants to Save College Sports. But From What, Exactly?

This week has seen a convergence of people desperately wanting to save college sports.

On Monday, three Louisville administrators released a white paper saying the enterprise is running out of time and in need of vast structural reforms in order to remain viable. Tuesday brought about a meeting of various school officials hosted by a private capital group in Dallas to discuss a new model for sustainability. On Friday, President Trump will host a roundtable discussing the issues facing the industry with an assortment of big names that can best be described as eclectic. In between, there is no shortage of opinions on social media pushing solutions to cure the ills which have affected athletics at universities both big and small across the country.

While such advocacy is noble—and even slightly inspiring given so many people from disparate backgrounds have banded together on the subject—there is one question that still remains unanswered in all the chatter: Do these people even know what it is they’re trying to save?

Because that has flown under the radar seemingly every time someone starts spouting off about solutions to fix the world of college athletics, which, while unruly in practice and often frustrating in its governance, is still coasting along just fine to record ratings, attendance and interest.

College sports are inherently messy, something you can view as a feature and not a bug depending upon how much money you stand to make in a career touching any aspect of it. Athletics at this level straddles the nebulous area between the fully professional leagues and the high school system below—something that, quite literally, has no parallel in the world like it. The European mind can barely fathom the concessions you’ll find at a conference basketball tournament, much less why players arrive at neutral sites in the month of March to cut down the nets they’re tasked with putting the ball through in the name of higher education.

In the Louisville paper, the school’s president, athletics director and chairman of the board of trustees open the eight-page document with a series of facts and figures related to the finances of various peers. They note Ohio State won the College Football Playoff and lost money. They cite Penn State’s growing debt load. They bring up the Cardinals’ dwindling reserves and ongoing deficit.

“These are not stories of mismanagement,” they wrote. “They are symptoms of a structural crisis that no individual institution can fix on its own.”

If that’s your starting point, you have gotten so far into the spreadsheets that you will struggle to view the big picture. College athletics is not a pursuit of a cost-effective return on investment—it’s the single greatest marketing tool for any university and the greatest entity to foster brand affection available on every single campus in the United States. If somebody is in the bookstore buying a T-shirt with a school logo on it, it’s not the byproduct of them attending Classic Greek Literature 101, but much more likely the downstream effect of the hoops team winning a March Madness game or the soccer program capturing the national title. In an ideal world, they’ll even listen to those calls to donate to the university when they’ve paid off the school loans.

More to the root of the statement, there has been plenty of mismanagement when it comes to those budgets cited. The Buckeyes currently list 16 staffers just in the business office of the athletic department and made Ryan Day the second-highest-paid coach in the country despite no other program (or NFL franchise) trying to hire him away. Dozens of other schools have continued to increase salaries of administrators and coaching staffs despite the advent of revenue sharing bringing a new line item of roughly $20.5 million each year to the budget. Many others have willingly voted in new members to their conferences despite an increase in travel costs that may stem from such moves, while coaching contracts featuring massive one-sided buyouts that schools will always end up paying remain the norm no matter what a state’s governor might yell about.

The mission statement of the NCAA is to “provide a world-class athletics and academic experience for student-athletes that fosters lifelong well-being.” It is not, “turn a profit and hand out trophies.”

Good luck finding a single athletic department whose expenses the last few years have actually shrunk outside the cost of inflation while their larger universities have found ways to handle budget cuts consistently in other areas. Louisville even cites $1.28 billion in economic impact for the city tied to its athletic department. While such figures can be a figment of the imagination of a consultant, a $12.5 million annual loss in one department of a larger university system seems like a worthwhile tradeoff to hit 10 figures worth of value in the broader community.

None of this stems from a structural crisis either, this is simply how the schools have actively chosen to operate. They are competitive with each other far more than they’re cooperative. If you don’t believe that, look no further than Alabama facilitating a lawsuit against the NCAA to get a former player eligible that even the school’s own conference commissioner opposed. And how many state attorneys general have gone to court in recent years at the behest of a state university trying to overcome a rule and get a player back out on the field?

Left unsaid in all of this is the key tenant of college sports that few involved ever seem to acknowledge: It is irrational at its core.

Lane Kiffin doesn’t leave Mississippi for LSU in the middle of the playoff run otherwise. Donors don’t cut checks for hefty buyouts because it gets them a nicer parking pass on Saturday afternoon—it’s so they can drive home happier after a win instead of a loss. It’s regularly overpaying a player more than what the market says just so your rival doesn’t land them. Buildings have been built and renovated all to add and remove waterfalls for goodness sake.

Fans watch the NCAA national championship men's basketball game between the Florida Gators and the Houston Cougars | Chris Watkins/Special to the Sun / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

We have had these kinds of signal flares advocating for big changes to the system approaching a decade now, if not longer. Commissions, committees, hearings and general grandstanding in the name of “saving” college sports have occurred on the regular. They have transpired from Capitol Hill to Las Vegas business forums and everywhere in between, on campus and off. They have resulted in a lot of words said and plenty of ink spilled, but the tangible progress which has stemmed from such advocating can be distilled into relative bupkis.

There has been no bill on its way to becoming law and there is no panacea of NCAA regulations that have pushed the enterprise forward in some grand leap. The only truth has been an increase in billable hours, benefitting the attorneys and not much else.

The upcoming presidential roundtable in particular might be the most farcical of attempts to find a solution yet. Golfers like Tiger Woods and Bryson DeChambeau were invited, perhaps because they were once seen on the sidelines of a football game? Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be there, too, because she seems to be the go-to name whenever you need to add an air of real-world credibility to something touching college athletics. Tim Tebow, Nick Saban and Urban Meyer are involved because cameras will naturally be present and someone needs to lend their name to the headline writers. NBA commissioner Adam Silver got an invite for good measure at the same time he’s trying to shake up Europe’s basketball landscape.

Not present? An actual player like Jeremiah Smith, Arch Manning or Dante Moore. Current coaches like Army’s Jeff Monken, Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea or Illinois’s Bret Bielema are nowhere to be found. The people dealing with the nitty gritty of college sports like football and basketball general managers or assistant athletic directors overseeing sports are out of sight and completely out of mind. We’ll see if either of the two commissioners that really control the direction of college athletics, the Big Ten’s Tony Petitti and the SEC’s Greg Sankey, will even be in attendance.

Regardless of the forum or titles involved around the roundtable, can anyone say what they’re fighting for beyond worrying about the bottom line of the budget in all of this? If you can’t articulate what it means to watch “One Shining Moment” in a few weeks, why college kids wave their shirts around in the stands for bad football teams, recall when you’ve flashed the surrender cobra or articulated how strangely special #Pac12AfterDark is, it’s probably best to go about your regularly scheduled programming instead.

Everybody wants to make a big deal about saving college sports right now because a lot of jobs are getting harder instead of the other way around. If they really want to do that though, they’ll have to embrace the chaos that they’re trying to tame and shame first.

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