Football Budgets as a Percentage of Overall University Budgets

[knapplc]

I'm ready for that hug whenever you are, ORD. You big lug.

 

[Muck]

That's definitely true. We aren't even close to being on par with
the flag-bearers of the Big Ten, and we know that. We're working hard right now
to build our academic prestige, specifically in research, by building an entirely
new campus between our two current Lincoln campuses.

Nobody knows Nebraska's shortcomings better than Nebraska. You'll have to bear
with us a bit. We'll be a better school five/ten years from now.

See this is why you're in the perfect position knap, you're a ground floor investor!!

Step 1: Go to a State U while it has to take every native mouthbreather who can manage to spell his name with fewer than 2 errors.

Step 2: Wait 25 years until that school has bootstrapped itself into being a highly respected public university.

Step 3: Sniff, look down your nose & attack some other 'subpar' school that is roughly in the same ball park as your Alma mater was when you attended.

Step 4: Profit

 

[ORD_Buckeye]

See this is why you're in the perfect position knap, you're a ground floor investor!!

Step 1: Go to a State U while it has to take every native mouthbreather who can manage to spell his name with fewer than 2 errors.

Step 2: Wait 25 years until that school has bootstrapped itself into being a highly respected public university.

Step 3: Sniff, look down your nose & attack some other 'subpar' school that is roughly in the same ball park as your Alma mater was when you attended.

Step 4: Profit

Just when we were getting along so well, Muck. FWIW, I was accepted to IU and Washington also, and as an OOS student, I didn't get to benefit from Ohio's misguided policies towards Ohio State.

Besides, even in its darkest days (which was a decade before I showed up) Ohio State was still a respected AAU university.

 

[Muck]

Some people just really need to grow some thicker skin and not get so god damned butthurt at every perceived slight.

 

[ORD_Buckeye]

Some people just really need to grow some thicker skin and not get so god damned butthurt at every perceived slight.

Touche!

 

[sandgk]

Bottom line - this thread has the makings of a classic.

 

[Muck]

All kidding aside if you draw up a broad list of categories that serve to identify Big Ten schools, Nebraska is competitive in many of them.

When we were playing with the various methods for identifying candidates for expansion or for the Conference Re-Draft time waster...Nebraska was rarely at the bottom when it came to current Big Ten schools. No they weren't often at the top either (outside of the various football related categories) but they were usually solidly mid-pack.

That tells me they fit into the conference just fine.

 

[sepia5]

Hey ORD, could you remind me again how you feel about my alma mater, Miami of Ohio?

 

[cincibuck]

Apples and Oranges. I'm worried by the escalating arms race both in coaching salaries and in overall football expenditures and facilities. I don't think it's a healthy trend for higher education.

That being said, there is something fundamentally different in the priorities of Ohio State and Michigan (football budgets <1% of the overall university budget) and Alabama and LSU (>11%). Essentially, it comes down to this. We can afford it without corrupting the overall university's mission and budget priorities.

Some of these SEC schools are akin to a welfare queen in public housing with shiny Cadillac to impress people.

$$$ = Academics? Maybe.

Things we (I) don't know: Are these the university's total revenue stream? If so, in the case of Ohio State, isn't the football budget "off" the university budget? As I understand it, the OSU athletic budget is autonomous - none of it goes to the university and no university funds go to the athletic department. If that's the case, wouldn't it be correct to state that the university received X dollars in 2011 and the athletic department received Y. X contains no Y dollars and Y contains no X dollars. In such a case wouldn't the athletic revenue = 0% of the school revenue?

Without knowing how each school worked - if their athletic budget/revenue was included as part of the school's budget/revenue - if the school's endowment fund was included as a part of the revenue - all we can say is that compared to the figure in column A, the figure in column B is X% as big.

We also don't know what % of column A was spent on real education costs - professors, classrooms, computers, labs, lab instruments per student. It could be despite taking in less money, Alabama spent a greater percent on educating each individual student.

For example, the kinesiology department at Michigan may have had a huge grant to spend on studying the effects of knee braces on offensive linemen. One full professor to sign the grant application and mail the study off to the New England Journal of Medicine, ten grad students to run all the tests, collect and collate all the data, run the longitudinal study, read and comment on the data, prepare and revise the report, show the professor how to enter the data into an excell file and 32 offensive linemen to receive credit for 12 hours of applied independent studies in kinesiology so that they can remain academically qualified.

In such a case a large amount of money was spent to the educational benefit of only 42 students and the rest of school's students received no value aside from watching offensive linemen play football.

OK, I'm being factious. BUT that's a part of every school's budgetary magic. You take in money from fine arts students, put it through the fiscal sausage grinding machine, and spend 30 cents of each dollar on educating each fine arts student and spend the other 70 cents of the fine arts student dollars on engineering or med school students -- along with each tuition dollar the engineering or med school student brought in.

Big 10 schools are way up on the research game, but a good deal of research money gets spent on a small group of students and universities are not very forthcoming in how much they spend on educating Nancy and Sluggo in their undergraduate courses, or the salaries of the actual teaching faculty --GTAs, adjuncts, non-tenure track PHDs and those professors without the kind of grants that allow you to not have to mess with undergrad students.

From this list, we just don't know.

 

[cincibuck]

See this is why you're in the perfect position knap, you're a ground floor investor!!

Step 1: Go to a State U while it has to take every native mouthbreather who can manage to spell his name with fewer than 2 errors.

Step 2: Wait 25 years until that school has bootstrapped itself into being a highly respected public university.

Step 3: Sniff, look down your nose & attack some other 'subpar' school that is roughly in the same ball park as your Alma mater was when you attended.

Step 4: Profit

I patented that road map in 1967.

Something to keep in mind, in the 50's - early 70's, Ohio State slipped in academic standing - in comparison to most other Big 10 schools and in comparison to other state schools across the nation. How much of that was perception? Does open enrollment = weak academics? When you consider that in those years between the opening exercises and spring graduation a full 2/3rds of each freshman class was dismissed for academic failure, it could have also meant that the freshman academic program was so rigorous that those who remained represented a typical "selective" school class.

Just a thought.

 

[knapplc]

The only problem with Muck's road map is that I don't have a formal education. I flunked out of UNL in the 80s. I'm self-educated, so no matter how prestigious UNL becomes, I don't have a degree to appreciate in value from them.

 

[ORD_Buckeye]

All kidding aside if you draw up a broad list of categories that serve to identify Big Ten schools, Nebraska is competitive in many of them.

When we were playing with the various methods for identifying candidates for expansion or for the Conference Re-Draft time waster...Nebraska was rarely at the bottom when it came to current Big Ten schools. No they weren't often at the top either (outside of the various football related categories) but they were usually solidly mid-pack.

That tells me they fit into the conference just fine.

The Muck is not wrong. That, however, does not negate the need to bust the new kid in town's balls for a probationary period.

 

[MUBuck]

But UGA athletics are a self sustaining entity exceeding a billion in revenue. Other SEC schools are close to that.
We aren't borrowing from faculty expeditures or state funding to rebuild a weightroom?

Even though the argument was based on a misunderstanding of the graph, I still think you missed the point. Being a self-sustaining entity doesn't mean anything in this argument. The point is that if you compare the percentage of money spent on football (even though that's not what the graph showed) versus that spent on stuff that's actually educational, the SEC far and away shows where their priorities lay.

It's like if you took a community college in Middle of Nowhere, Deep South, and assigned the Atlanta Falcons to them. Sure, the Falcons will exceed a billion in revenue like the SEC schools, but to what benefit of the school? Hyperbole, I know, but this is higher education, after all. A respected and reputable university shouldn't be spending more than a percentage or two of their total budget on a single sport, in my opinion, no matter how much money is made from it.

Your other point was well taken, though. A medical campus and a larger enrollment will certainly skew the expenditures.

 

[Gatormaniac]

If it nets the school money to do so, yes, they should toss money at the football program. The University of Florida rolls most of the profit from their athletic department right into the academic side. This also is why UF rarely plays nonconference home-and-aways apart from FSU and stays in-state as much as humanly possible - the university could care less about people complaining about weak OOC scheduling if adding home-and-away series cost the academic side a million bucks a year (which is basically what it amounts to).

From that perspective, a football team is just another part of their endowment, and they're correct in thinking of it that way. To use the Atlanta Falcons bit: imagine the community college had no athletic program whatsoever, but straight up owned the actual NFL Falcons. Wouldn't that provide a good stream of revenue for that community college to grow with? If you can get your school sports to be the moneymaker directly, so much the better.

UF has used its football program to grow one of the larger research budgets in the US (15th). There are a few other SEC schools which are definitely plowing the extra money from their teams back into academics - Georgia certainly is, Kentucky probably as well but with basketball as the cash cow... of course, Auburn and the two Mississippi schools don't seem to be doing this, so feel free to heap scorn on them.

(Incidentally, there's a huge variance in the B1G research budgets. OSU, Michigan, and Wisconsin are putting serious money towards it, while some of the others are just plain sad. Indiana in particular is pathetic - if friggin' Auburn has a larger budget for research than you....)

 

[MUBuck]

If it nets the school money to do so, yes, they should toss money at the football program. The University of Florida rolls most of the profit from their athletic department right into the academic side.

From my understanding, the profits from football (and basketball at some places) go directly to funding the rest of the sports. I can't remember the exact number, but I believe OSU has upwards of 30 varsity sports. None of these sports but two even come close to supporting themselves, and therefore rely on the revenue sports for financial support. I'd be very, very surprised if there's enough of a profit from the Athletic Department to pass on to the university.