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Comment by impendia | Hacker News Reader

> Why can't the American football industry run itself more like the American baseball industry?

I am a very strong opponent of the overwhelming sports culture at American universities, and of the absurd sums of money spent to sustain it. (Example: Dabo Swinney was just given a $93 million contract to remain the football coach of Clemson.)

This

>Defenders of the current system will often claim that football is profitable for universities and provides funding for academics

is part of the reason. But the real argument is: successful football programs generate positive publicity for the school; they encourage more strong high school students to apply for admission; they encourage alumni to open their pocketbooks and donate.

Personally, as a professor at an American university, I don't buy it. But evidently my bosses do.

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I don't mind the strong sports culture. College football has an immense history dating back to the late 1800s as an organized national collegiate activity. I'm a fan and I enjoy the history and pageantry of the sport. Athletic departments are self-funded by donations, TV rights, ticket sales, and merchandise, and they take no money that would otherwise be allocated to academics. They also can increase the brand of a university, as you pointed out.

I take issue with a couple things: First is that unpaid 'workers' are responsible for driving an industry now worth billions of dollars. Second is that some scholarship athletes are admitted to schools they have no business attending on academic merit, and end up in essentially remedial education. This is true even at prestigious schools with high-level academics.

"Athletic departments are self-funded by donations, TV rights, ticket sales, and merchandise, and they take no money that would otherwise be allocated to academics"

That is absolutely not true. At least $300 a semester of my tuition went to our sports programs. And I went to a public university in the US. We don't even have that prestigious a football team. I can't imagine how much students pay at schools like Alabama.

Big football programs make big money, small programs don't.

For the 2012-2013 season University of Texas brought in over $100 million with under $30 million in expenses. Same year Alabama brought in $88 million on $47 mil in expenses.

edit: The magnitude of these numbers is why I think these teams and perhaps a 4-year league should be spun off and the players should be paid.

-https://smartycents.com/articles/college-football-revenue/

> immense history dating back to the late 1800s

It's such an american thing to say that something just over a hundred years old has immense history. I own furniture and other stuff, which my grandparents inherited, that is probably older than that.

Sure the stuff has some history, but it's barely a few generations.

I got an MBA from a fairly small private university. Speaking to the head of admissions he only wished the school had a D1 football team so that more people had heard of it.

There is a strong history of associating the identity of the school with its football program (though I expect this to wane as we learn more about the long-term impact of concussions). Let’s take Ohio State as an example: it is more compelling of a mid tier graduate program because of its success on the football field.

I don’t say that as a knock on OSU: they have fine academics. But being a Buckeye is very connected to the football team.

Same with Alabama. I currently live in Birmingham and when I relocated I was asked all the time, “whose your team?” That question only has two acceptable answers: Auburn or Alabama. There is no option for “none of the above.”

But I still expect this to wane given a long enough horizon. From a sample of one, I used to be very involved in college football and NFL fantasy football leagues. But over the last five years I’ve become less comfortable with the sport (it feels like watching a Roman gladiator match). I’m [edit: bearish] on the 15 year horizon for the sport: I think we’ve reached peak football.

> they encourage more strong high school students to apply for admission

By encouraging more students to apply, they have the opportunity to turn down more applicants and appear more selective, boosting their position in college rankings.

The whole thing is ridiculous. We are supposed to be educating students, not giving them brain damage.

> successful football programs generate positive publicity for the school

Maybe for lower tier colleges, but I sincerely doubt that anyone gives a rodents behind how the football teams of Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, CalTech and others top-tier Universities are, before applying to them.

To my surprise I have heard, of Princeton in particular, that football is very important to alumni. When I visited, there was certainly no shortage of athletic swag sold across the street from campus.

They are in the Ivy League, which means they don't give out athletic scholarships. They would be crushed by any D1 team. And, yet, the alumni (many of whom are deep-pocketed) care.

Sure, the alumni care as it probably gives them something to root for and bond them. But, I'm sure the applying students don't care, which was my point.

Apparently even Caltech has been sanctioned for violating NCAA rules.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.si.com/college-basketball/2...

Those sanctions were widely ridiculed in the sports press.

Briefly, it is not uncommon at Caltech for students who have two or three possible electives that would fit into one open slot in the schedule to not register for any of them at the start of the term, and sit in on all of them and do the homework for all of them for two or three weeks, and then decide which to take. They then register for that one.

This practice is approved by the faculty and administration.

Caltech had just gotten a new head of athletics, and while reviewing student records he realized that (1) several students on Caltech teams had done this "try before registering" thing, (2) for those two or three weeks, before they picked and registered for one of those courses, they were technically, by NCAA rules, part time students, not full time students, and (3) they had attended team practice sessions during that time.

It's against NCAA rules to allow part time students on a team, including team practices. The new head of athletics reported Caltech's inadvertent violation of this rule to the NCAA, and also reported that all student athletes were properly full time before participating in any games, and that they would make sure in the future to not allow students to join the team until they had registered for a full load.

The NCAA response was to put more severe sanctions on Caltech than they had put on major athletic schools that had committed massive rules violations, such as fake classes and grades to keep players from becoming ineligible for low grades, bribes, and the like.

The sports press take on this was generally it was more evidence that the NCAA is incompetent and/or corrupt. The NCAA had been criticized for slaps on the wrists against those big schools with big money sports programs, so many thought that they came down hard on Caltech to try to look like they could be tough without the downside of damaging one of the big money making athletic programs.

Northwestern is a pretty good school, but apparently its sudden appearance in bowl games years ago did boost the applications.

Is it really still profitable in e.g. that case of Dabo Swinney landing a 93 million dollar contract?

The places where the profitability of football is in question is basically everything lower than the 5 main conferences (Big 10, SEC, ACC, Big XII, and Pac 10), and especially the schools lower than that level which aren't reliable winners. (Think the San Jose State's of the world)

Clemson football generated 50 million dollars last year

https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/sports/college/clemso...

While 93 million over 10 years works out to being a pretty sizable chunk of that for one employee,

yeah, its still a profitable enterprise

It's profitable only because the players aren't paid. Only a small percentage of the players make it to the NFL. Many of the remainder suffer physical consequences for the rest of their lives. It's one of the most obscene exploitation schemes still remaining.

> It's profitable only because the players aren't paid.

No.

The NFL minimum salary is under $500k and by your own admission these players aren't that good.

Even a generous $200k/yr and a generous 100 player roster only adds up to $20 million, and there are teams with over $50 million in profits.

First, there are not many teams with over $50 million in profits, only the top 13 as of 2018. [0]

Second, you're assuming that even the top players would only make the minimum, which you have arbitrarily set at $200k, assuming that they would be paid less than the minimum NFL salary. The more accurate measure would be to pay them some percentage of the average NFL salary, which was $1.9 million in 2018. [1] So assuming the average college player salary would be 40% (to use your arbitrary number), that would be just under $800k per player. Even with a 53-player roster, that puts player salaries at over $40 million annually, which wipes out profits for all but the top 15 or 20 teams.

Third, I didn't say these players "aren't that good." The fact that only 2% of them make it to the NFL doesn't mean the other 98% aren't that good, it just means that the market won't bear paying for more players when they're fairly compensated.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2018/09/11/college-f...

[1] https://gazettereview.com/2017/03/average-nfl-player-salary/

The average college football player, with their 2% chance of making it to the NFL, is worth the median NFL salary of roughly $800k? This has gone a little too far off track for me.

The core issue here is claiming that profits are derived from not paying players. There are plenty of teams not paying players and losing money. The top teams could pay players well and still make profit. There's a small Goldilocks zone where what players should be paid lines up with the team's level of profit. The old "profits come from not paying workers" canard is a story with little to no explanatory power here.

that's nothing against the european hooligan scene, who meet to literally bash each other's heads in, in the extreme cases. While the societal affiliations hardly compare, the disparity is the same.

If you lose, it's your fault, but if you win, then we win. It's symptomatic, whether with burned out programmers, upto and over 50% of university drop-outs (in certain programs like maths or physics at least), blue collar workers who break their backs, etc. etc.

University athletic departments have to compete with NFL salaries in much the same way that university CS departments have to compete with FAANG salaries.

Clemson's football program has been exceptional under Dabo. I can see how his 10-year contract is justified.

The top college football programs pull in over a hundred million in revenue each year. Clemson is on it's way there. And that's only in media, ticket sales and such. I'm sure schools with excellent football programs are more likely to attract students and alumni donations.

Check out this WSJ table with revenues from the 2018 season. https://graphics.wsj.com/table/NCAA_2019?mod=article_inline

EDIT: Thinking more about it—there are secondary effects as well. If a team does well, it attracts fans from out of town. Those fans will spend money on food, drinks, entertainment and hotels. That provides local businesses money and the city tax revenues.

Clemson pulls in about $50M / year from football alone, not counting any tangentially related revenue it may generate.

Athletic departments don't necessarily have a need to be profitable, and most are not. Clemson averages ~$77 million in revenue over the last few years, mostly from valuable TV rights and ticket sales.

If investing in the sports really brought the university more revenue than otherwise, I wouldn't mind, so long as that money went to things like research and lowered tuition, which I know it unfortunately likely wouldn't.

I don’t mind the strong sports cultural. I’d rather people find an outlet for their in build tribal tendencies through sports than something more destructive like race or politics.

You don't buy it? But here we are... two total strangers with (presumably) no relationship to the University of Alabama, discussing the University of Alabama because of their football program that got their university into the New York Times and onto the homepage of Hacker News.

I guess we can debate whether "positive" equals "positive sentiment" or "positive success in generating brand awareness." However, the fact that this article exists underscores the positive publicity value of the Alabama football program regardless of whether this specific article is good or bad publicity.

In other words, the NYT never writes this article for Sheboygan State University's football program because not enough people care about it (note: it doesn't exist... nor does Sheboygan State... it's just a generic example so I wouldn't offend anyone with the name of a real university).

In contrast, people care about the University of Alabama's football program, which results in people caring about the University of Alabama.

Could’ve used an NYC Manhattan school for NYT not writing about their sports program. I doubt any of them have one :)

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