Athletics spending is irresponsible

[It's the Journey...]

He might also want to actually attend a football or basketball game, where he'd see the athletes he despises so much are not exactly wallowing in luxurious, opulent facilities.

I will answer this charge by referring you to this part of his article.

I've been to the games, I high-fived the mascot, I've cheered my team to victory and felt inspired by my fellow students' accomplishments on the field.

Matt HAS been to many sporting events. He has even attended, OMG, minor sport events at BGSU. So maybe reading all this was written would be in order next time.

[JoeFalcon]

Um, that doesn't change my point in the slightest. I read the sentence and stand by what I originally said, word for word.

I also stand by the many other points raised in my post as well that you wisely didn't challenge:

"He might try volunteering his time for a sports program or serving a practicum or internship with the athletic department. These fine folks are the least wasteful people you can possibly imagine by necessity. They operate on shoestring budgets and manage as best they can against opponents with 50 times the resources, i.e. 2003 and 2006 football opponent Ohio State.

Waste can be found in many other areas of the University besides scholarship money that gives kids the opportunity to participate in college sports. If he wants to play populist and rile up "the people" for his cause, he could have picked a much easier target than the BGSU athletic program."

Your friend has the right to his opinion, and we have the right to pick it apart piece by misguided piece. It's tough to swallow the impression he's a diehard Falcon fan, though, when he argues for the revocation of athletic scholarship money that would disband the Falcon Club and send the athletic department spiraling into the nether regions of obscurity and end decades of proud tradition in Division I competition.

[Rightupinthere]

Was this a reprint from 1990? I've seen this argument from somewhere before, I just knows [sic] it!

In other words, it's an opinion which is not new.

[Flipper]

Matt HAS been to many sporting events. He has even attended, OMG, minor sport events at BGSU. So maybe reading all this was written would be in order next time.

Yeah...good idea, get snotty with people. That will force them to see how smart you really are...

[h2oville rocket]

With regards to his writing style, my gosh if you've read what passes for "thought" on editorial pages anymore, his style is right in line. Newspaper editorials have become harsher and more strident in the past few years. Well paid and widely read columnists routinely dismiss those who disagree with them as ignorant, dishonest or un-American. His dismissive, blow-off style just reflects this coarse age.



Go Falcons!!

Thank talk radio for that, going back to Joe Pine and maybe before. I'm not going to bite the hand that fed me in my college days but I have read a study that came out sometime after SMU got the death penalty. It looked at alumni giving, enrollment, name awareness and several other issue for schools that dropped athletics and found no change in most instances and improvement in those areas in some instances.

But since I didn't believe it I denied their premise, dismissed their research and ignored thier findings and hence can't cite the study. I firmly believe that the athletic tail wags the dog all too often in college but it ain't changinganytime soon. I loved my years competing and since the advent of Title 9 a lot more folks have the opportunity so I guess its all good.

[It's the Journey...]

Matt HAS been to many sporting events. He has even attended, OMG, minor sport events at BGSU. So maybe reading all this was written would be in order next time.

Yeah...good idea, get snotty with people. That will force them to see how smart you really are...

It's not the first time anyone has gotten snotty with another on here. Actually it's becomming the norm and not the exception. I was simply commenting on the accusation that he should attent an athletic event before forming an opinion and writing on it. As he stated, and I confirm, he has attended many sporting events of many of the athletic teams BG fields.

[SmurK]

Just wanted to let you all know that I am listening (or reading) in. I plan to make an in-depth post that responds to a lot of these concerns with the opinion I published today.

First and foremost, it is important to note that I do indeed encourage and want you to write into the BG News. The comments that have filled this thread with three pages are things that should be put out into the open for all to see. Much like certain components of my column today, most of what has been written here has been considered for years.

My abusive language was more intended for my peers. I wanted my fellow students to write in and (while this is an entirely different issue) I was trying to egg them on in replying. IMO, 95%+ of the students here would not take the initiative to even ask what goes into the general fee, and this apathy is a far worse trait for a college graduate to have than a column devoid of factual support for certain points I make (I'll get back to this in my next post). If they don't take the initiative to check waht their money is going to, how do you get them to sit down and write a letter to the editor? Conflict!

It is, in fact, one of the news values that determines the order in which news stories are placed in a paper. Conflict is interesting. It excites and entices the reader to take in the whole column and get all the way to the end where, in this case, the conflict is set squarely on them.

And, of course, I believe my attacks to be factual. I believe those who support a $13 million budget that gives only about 480 students the chance to compete 18 varsity sports is wasteful. My high school athletics program accomplished many of the same goals you are claiming our wasteful athletics program does. We even got alumni to donate money for a new weight training facility. I'll check to see what the exact budget was at my school, but I am confident it was under $1 million, even with the fancy stadium, uniforms and press coverage.

Speaking of money, no, the BG News doesn’t get any from the “University.” You mean the students, right? Not even you ever-educated individuals have checked what we get billed for in our general fee. Here is the link. Notice two things, while the radio station and BG 24 News (I think) gets funding, the BG News does not. It is not even a registered student org. I have worked on the BG News for almost four-and-a-half years and have served on the board of student publications for two.

I can not stress this enough: the BG News is independent of the University. That is why I was able to write this column.

Two other important things to note, as I am sure by the time I write again I will be responding to a total of like six pages: I am in support of intercollegiate athletics. I do not believe students who never visit a game should pay more than $500 a year to support a program that could probably accomplish its same goals at less than half the cost and with more students participating in more sports.

I am also not attacking BGSU specifically. Of course, I listed statistics for BGSU athletics and spoke directly to BGSU students, but the fact is this problem exists all around the state and across the country, except in Columbus. But if you are graduating 10,000 students a year you won’t have a problem building or filling a big-ass stadium like their’s with high ticket prices. There will never be a ticket lottery for individual games at BGSU. Our program will never make a profit if we continue to spend $13 million.

If it is the NCAA that causes these programs to be so large and wasteful, then the NCAA had better change its ways. Well, I say that, but there will never be a group of students gather together and actually do anything about this. While they may care, they don’t care enough to lift a finger on this issue, even if it is costing them more than $500 a year.

I battle everyday with the thought that I may be able to lead such a campaign, but such a campaign could single-handedly end my career as a journalist.

[HoustonFalcon]

As someone that has an inside look at college athletics and how a good program can bring in more students, I'll put my opinion here on this one.

Even though I'm coaching at a Junior College, we have had one of the best baseball teams in the country for years. Our baseball team has produced Roger Clemens, Andy Pettite, Jessie Crain, and a few others over the last 25 years. And you can bet that being the "Yankees" of JUCO over that time, as one of the coaches in the JUCO World Series called us, has affected our out of state enrollment, and the exposure we have had. We don't charge admission to our games, not even for regular fans. Our athletics programs are not self sufficient by any means. But everyone in the state of Texas that follows baseball knows who we are. And our mens basketball team is the same way. There are two players currently in the NBA that played for us, Sam Cassel and Steve Francis. When I go around the city and say that I coach basketball at San Jac, they always mention our basketball and baseball teams. They don't mention any other programs at the school, it's always one of those two teams. And fundraising is helped every year by the fact that our teams do well. It is not wasteful spending at all.

And as far as BG goes, when I moved down here 7 years ago, hardly anyone knew who I was talking about. Now, a heck of a lot more people know who I'm talking about, and where they are located. All because of our athletic program, and the kids getting scholarships paid for by the unveristy are the main reason. For all of those that say it is wasteful, which is a majority on here, you really need to look at all of the facts first.

[Schadenfreude]

Well lets just go and burn him at the steak.

I prefer mine medium, not burned.

[Schadenfreude]

All right, Smurk:

The most unfortunate part of your opinion piece was the accusation that Bowling Green’s athletic department is wasting money.

You offer no support for that accusation at all.

Sure, you feebly tried (and continue to try) to demonstrate waste by comparing Bowling Green’s Division I-A athletic program to that of a typical Ohio high school.

It’s an absurd comparison. In fact, it’s not just absurd – it’s insulting.

Bowling Green is competing at the highest level of American college sport, and you want to talk about high school?

Come on.

Let’s search for a more reasonable comparison, shall we?

Eastern Michigan University recently compared athletic department budgets across the MAC to get a sense of where it stood. It ranked Bowling Green fourth overall in spending.*

http://www.emich.edu/strategicplanning/ ... budgets%22

That may seem a little high -- but keep in mind, Bowling Green is just one of three universities in the MAC – and just one of 13 in the entire country – that fields a Division I-A football team and a Division I men’s hockey program.

If you look closer, you will find Bowling Green spends less than Miami and Western Michigan, the MAC’s other two members of the Central Collegiate Hockey Association.

You will also find that Bowling Green’s athletic department budget is dwarfed – in a colossal manner – by much of the rest of Division I-A, and that Bowling Green is far from alone in devoting part of its general fee to athletics in exchange for free student admission. (West Virginia, for example, appears to use the same model).

I do concede that you have tapped into an enormous contradiction that has invaded much of the American higher education system: This compulsion for institutions of learning to compete in high profile contests of brute strength and speed and athleticism rather than on brain power.

The Canadians, by and large, consider it absurd. Universities don’t award athletic scholarships up there – which is why many of the best Canadian football and hockey players find their way to the United States rather than competing for Laval or York or Windsor or Western Ontario.

The French also consider it absurd. Check out these French kids gawking at the spectacle of college athletics at Bowling Green – which, as you know, isn’t quite the mass phenomenon here that it is certain other places in Middle America.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaIbNNJMX4o

So, if you want to argue that we need mass culture change in America and Bowling Green need to be on the vanguard of that cultural change, I encourage sack up and actually make that argument.

Argue we should be more like the Canadians. Argue we should be more like the French.

Or, heck, argue we should be more French Canadian – and that we should try to inspire the rest of America to follow our lead.

Or, perhaps you should argue we should get rid of Division I hockey. (Good luck with that, considering that sport's history at BGSU).

In the meantime, this is what I know.

In about eight hours, Bowling Green will kick off its season by hosting Wisconsin in a game that will be televised in Toledo, in Cleveland, in Dayton, all over Wisconsin and on sports networks in Michigan and in New York.

For three hours, in front of millions of potential viewers (and, I suspect, hundreds of thousands of actual viewers), Bowling Green will be mentioned in the same breath with Wisconsin, one of the best public universities in the United States.

I do not have the time or the energy to contact all the television stations and networks that will be airing the game to calculate what it would cost to buy three hours of advertising time aimed at positioning our brand closer to that of the University of Wisconsin.

But I think it is safe to say that it would be a multimillion dollar investment – perhaps all of the $8.5 million or so devoted from the student fees to our athletic department.

In other words, it is possible our entire investment in athletics may have paid for itself in the first two weeks of the academic year.

And that’s not all.

We will also get three hours of coast-to-coast exposure on ESPN2 when Miami plays at Bowling Green. We will get three more hours of national exposure on ESPN2 when Bowling Green travels to Toledo. We will get more exposure when ESPNU covers our game with Central Michigan. We will be exposed, in person, to close to 100,000 people when our team plays at Ohio State – along with the massive statewide radio coverage that goes along with that, and, potentially, more television coverage.

And that’s just football. We will get more exposure on regional sports networks for basketball and hockey – much of it quite favorable when you consider some of those games may involve the University of Michigan, or Michigan State, or Ohio State or Notre Dame or Miami.

In some ways, I believe Bowling Green’s investment in Division I athletics is even more critical for us than it is for institutions like Michigan or Wisconsin or Miami.

Take Division I athletics away from Michigan or Wisconsin or Miami, and it will still be widely understood that these are among the best public universities in the country.

But we are still trying to brand ourselves that way. By competing in Division I, we send the message that we want to be considered among the best, that this is an institution that deserves to be considered by prospective students right along with these other strong public universities.

Is this logical? Perhaps not. Perhaps the Canadians and the French are right.

But it is the America we live in.

To shift gears a bit and wrap up this post, I would finally ask you to reflect upon the fact that you chose to attend Bowling Green.

By choosing to attend Bowling Green, you chose to join a community that, over the course of several generations, has decided that Division I athletics is part of its mission, and that a portion of the student fee should be used to support that mission.

You are certainly welcome to challenge that decision and rally others to your point of view and fight for long term change. You are in an academic environment, after all. Inquiry and asking tough questions is part of that. Perhaps you are right and perhaps the generations of students and administrators and alumni who came before you all had it horribly wrong.

But in the short term, if you find the resources Bowling Green devotes to athletics that offensive to you, you do have other options.

You could choose to attend Wright State or Cleveland State, for example – two universities that devote a whole lot less money to college athletics.

You could choose to attend Ohio State – which may not charge you anything from your student fee for athletics (I don’t know for sure), but will charge you nearly as much to attend a season’s worth of football games as Bowling Green is now assessing for all athletics on your student fee this semester.

And if waste is your concern, Ohio State might be fun. Considering its $90 million athletic budget, I'll bet you could have a whale of a time picking it over for excesses.

---

* No, EMU’s numbers do not match what you and I see in BGSU’s general fee budget. I’m going to assume EMU tried to account for capital costs or something on order to make a fairer comparison to the way they account for things. The specific number isn’t worth arguing about. The point is, our costs are in line with the rest of the conference.

[Tricky_Falcon]

Funny I know those guys from utube video, they were in my marketing class senior year. The two French girls were actually pretty hot. By the way osu now has a $100 million athletic budget big story about it on the front page of the dispatch about a week ago. hooraaay!

[SmurK]

Universities capitalize on ignorance
Matt Clark
Posted: 9/8/06
Universities all across Ohio are billing their students millions of dollars for programs in which most of them will never participate.

Only a few of these institutions publish the details of this billing on their Web sites, they include Bowling Green State University, Miami University and the University of Toledo.

The others hide what students pay for when they tear a check for these institutions' mysterious "general fees." In all, students at those universities will be charged about $2000 for intercollegiate athletics by the time they graduate.

What's more, only a handful, let's say around five percent, will even know they were billed for it, because the fee breakdown was only available upon request. Isn't that so crooked, almost criminal?

When these students are floundering to feed their children, or buy their first home and they can't-because they are still $10,000 in debt-none of them will know they were billed so much money for something they didn't care about.

When they are forced to live in a cold efficiency in order to make their loan payments, the coaches and athletic directors of their alma mater will be kicking it in the burbs watching the big game on a plasma television, sitting on a leather couch, smoking a big, fat "I steal from the poor" cigar.

Some of these people make more than $200,000 off ignorant, unknowing, unorganized and extremely poor students to perform a task that has very little to do with the mission of a university.

And why you ask? The answer: for absolutely, positively no reason whatsoever.

There is not a single shred of evidence to support the fact that the millions of dollars in overspending these institutions commit to athletics will bring a dime into their education budgets.

If you go visit your college library, as I did, it will probably take you about 30 minutes to find five books dating back as far as the 1980s that support the conclusion that spending $30,000 per athlete is a complete waste of students' money.

Let's begin with a book called "The Game of Life," that included a study of 90,000 alumni and students nationwide.

This book shows winning teams don't result in more donations; programs at all levels lose money, athletes play no special leadership role on campus and athletes are much more likely to finish at the bottom of their class.

A 1985 journal article - the culmination of a dozen studies of hundreds of institutions over a fifty-year period - states athletics spending actually depresses alumni donations and does not increase enrollment.

Time and time again, universities have completely dropped major sports, including football and basketball, only to find enrollment and donations increase like they never did before.

Given those facts, I propose that we cut the athletics budget in half while doubling the amount of sports and quadrupling the amount of student-athletes. In the end, students would be billed $400 instead of $2000.

In order to do this, students will have to work together and lobby their universities to change the NCAA's rules, reorganize the divisions, set maximum salaries for coaches and athletic directors and set a maximum on student-athlete scholarship spending to be at least half of what it is today.

Essentially, this would finally end the athletics arms race.

Can you hear that? That's the coaches, the athletic directors, the university administrators and even your student leaders laughing at you.

Why are they laughing? Because they know you are pathetic; they know that you will never "gather together and lobby!" We're not in the middle of the civil rights era! This isn't Vietnam! What, do you think students in this day of age care about anything but the cost of a keg?

In actuality, the high price of tuition in states across the nation is so high, it's a greater threat than any other we are currently facing. It threatens to kill more of us than terrorism ever will.

You, the student, can blame the adults all you want, but it's you who's the problem. You are the one who is stealing $2,000 a year from millions of college students. And what's more, you don't feel guilty about it at all.

[Bleeding Orange]

Matt, do you realize how much of our tax money goes to programs and services that you and I will never use? The IRS and the FG does not give us a choice as to where that money goes, and rightfully so. Just like all students are participants in the University, we are all participants in our nation. We all make our contributions and then utilize certain programs/services when we want/choose/need to.

There is nothing criminal about student fees and no one tries to hide the fact that they are there and where they are going to. Every college has them. And just like taxes, we all pay our share.

And do you really think that, among the myriad other paperwork associated with going to college, people really want an itemized breakdown of where student fees are going on top of all of that? By the time they even get to it, most people would be so sick of seeing the stuff that they would probably just say "meh, screw it." But, I guess you'll probably argue that all that paperwork is just another part of the vast right-wing conspiracy...

[Warthog]

You're kidding me, right. He didn't really write that in the paper did he?

What the hell. Let's just abolish all sports in America. Professional teams are a joke. How can I afford to take my family of five to an NFL game when ticket prices average $65. We would have to sell our home and move into a cardboard box to be able to afford it. That's it! We can blame homelessness on professional sports. Therefore, we must abolish professional sports. Americans unite, you imbecils.

[Warthog]

And do you really think that, among the myriad other paperwork associated with going to college, people really want an itemized breakdown of where student fees are going on top of all of that? By the time they even get to it, most people would be so sick of seeing the stuff that they would probably just say "meh, screw it." But, I guess you'll probably argue that all that paperwork is just another part of the vast right-wing conspiracy...

Good points BO. How about each students only pay for the teachers salaries for the classes they are taking? Each professors salary is divided among the students in each class. Therefore, you would want to sign up for only classes with large numbers because your pro rated costs are lower. Why should you have to pay the salary of the Intermediate Cost Accounting II professor when you are a Music major? Do the same thing for each building. Divided the utility bills by number of students and you get a bill to pay for the A/C, heat. lighting, etc, each month. The more I think about it, this is a great idea!