OuterWorldVoice said:
99.9% of the people in a US college are NOT athletes, but they devote 50% of their identity to that.
The specificity of that stat made me curious, so I checked. At my alma mater (a Big Ten school, so it may not be typical,) 2.91% of the undergrads are athletes on official team rosters.
A friend of mine is an assistant coach at a local, small, liberal arts college (DivIII.) They recently added lacrosse, for which there's virtually no spectator demand for in the area. I asked him why they added it and I think his answer might shed some light on what Salazar is calling a dysfunction.
Basically, athletics provide more to the institution than just the revenue directly associated with sports. Indeed, I doubt you could fund the football coaching staff's salaries on just the athletics revenue at my friend's school. Sure, there is that revenue, but also each athlete's scholarship represents the tuition amount transferring from the endowment fund to the operating fund. It also acts as a recruitment tool, for example, my friend's school recruits in the Chicago area for both athletic and non-athletic students and lacrosse is popular enough there that adding a team helps them recruit, at the very least the 20 or so prospective members of the team never would have considered this school otherwise. Sports give something for the students to do, both in supporting the teams themselves and in that some facilities for official teams can be used by the general student body. Finally, the school spirit and loyalty that sports engender helps alumni relations/donations.
Think of it this way - university presidents aren't as dumb as Salazar implied, so if only 20 programs are making a profit on their athletic departments, you can bet that the other thousands of school with athletic departments have a pretty damned good reason to keep them, one that goes beyond a simplistic P/L statement. There are two small, private universities in my town, both are similar in enrollment, faculty, both are well over a hundred years old, both field 22 athletic teams, one is slightly more selective, the other has a slightly larger endowment. One is DivIII in the NCAA, the other is in the NAIA. Guess which one has a significantly higher reputation.
Also Salazar, you keep making two mistakes,
1) College sports teams are not franchises. That term applies to a particular business model used mainly by North American professional sports leagues and teams.
2) Penn State is not "Penn." Penn State is Pennsylvania State University, a public land grant university that competes in the Big Ten Conference notable for its football program. Penn is University of Pennsylvania, a separate private liberal arts university that competes in the Ivy League notable for its fencing program.
