The head coach of football gets paid $4mil a year (4x the president) and is the highest payed employee. The top 7 staff are all sports related.
Is this, like, common in the US? It seems batshit insane to an outsider.
Is this, like, common in the US? It seems batshit insane to an outsider.
So the athletics department is not only self-sustaining and self-funding, but it funds academics as well.
It's basically as if Man U sent some of its profits to Manchester University.
It makes sense if you do the math.
Newer schools and smaller schools, typically not so much.
A lot of what we do in the US probably sounds batshit insane to outsiders so no worries about that and thanks for asking!
On the one hand, yes, this is absolutely batshit insane.
On the other hand, college sports are enormously popular; football games regularly play to sold out crowds of over 50,000, and during football season there will be games on TV all weekend (not just local ones). They bring in a lot of revenue and publicity for the university -- and the latter (debatably?) helps attract students to apply.
Regarding the latter, it’s weird and certainly was exploitative when college athletes weren’t allowed to monetize through sponsorships and frankly still is exploitative.
So US educational institutions don't really have any hangup against treating sports any differently than they might treat a CS class.
They are a subject you have to study and train at...and sometimes sit in a theatre and have a class time about (watching scout footage or deconstructing plays, etc).
Sports are probably just as rigorous as anything else academically once you get to something approaching a division 1 level of play. The reason we don't recognize it is because we suck and are mostly casual about it on a forum like this (filled with sports failures like myself or sports non-participants). The people actually in these programs with D1 scholarships and whatnot I guarantee take it as seriously as you or I would take calculus.
What I find strange in the US context is the emphasis on it as a (revenue generating!) spectator sport. I understand that amateur (for want of a better word) sports can be highly entertaining; what I don't understand is why you'd go to university teams to find the best amateurs. I've played and watched enough sport to know that it's common for academic and physical abilities to be not particularly well correlated, particularly at tails of the distributions.