You're right of course. It's really depressing. Football is almost unrecognisable to us golden oldies.
On another take, as an American, what do you think about College sports, the revenue generated but not used educationally. The ridiculous amount of money paid to the sports coaches as compared to the academic staff etc etc. My sister is head of a history department in a massive famous university so I know my facts are correct. The Dean of Studies, the most important job on the academic side earns around 800 000. The basketball and football coaches earn 5 and 6 million respectively
So is this a place of higher education or as my sister remarks, a couple of sports teams with some teaching attached? There's definitely something rather disturbing about this.
Well, it's (obviously) very complicated.
I think the players should be paid and have more freedom to transfer from school to school.
With respect to wages. Nick Saban (Alabama football coach) is making around $6 million/year, but it's paid for by the massive amount of money he brings into the school with all the trophies. No disrespect to your sister (or any educator) but nobody buys tickets to watch her/them teach. Broadcast companies aren't offering billions to schools hoping to broadcast history classes. The coaches make that much money because the market (currently) makes it financially feasible.
The revenue generated doesn't have anything to do with academics, so why should the athletic department that creates the revenue be forced to give it to the Science department just because they don't think it's "fair"? If someone donates $4 million to the History Department (and specifically states it is to support historical studies), the school wouldn't force them to share it with the English Department, or decline the donation.
What
MemphisWill
said earlier was spot on. Most big time university athletic departments are only lightly subsidized by student fees. Most pay for themselves. And keep in mind that college football and men's basketball are the only two sports that turn a profit for the school. The rest lose money. Further, due to Title IX laws, there must be gender equality in the scholarships/sports offered. So you can't field the only two sports that make money, you have to have an equal number of women's sports.
And she may not admit it, but the academics at schools almost always improve with athletics. When schools succeed in athletics and become national brands, they become more desirable, which leads to an increase in applications, which allows the school to be more selective about the quality of student, and also allows the school to increase tuition, room/board (demand/supply) and (for public schools) gives them greater political cache to get funding for improvements.
The University of Connecticut was an average (at best) public school. A safety-school (backup plan) 30 years ago. Then they won a few national championships in men's and women's basketball, within a decade the state legislature agreed to a massive $1 billion infrastructure improvement plan. New roads, new dorms, new classroom buildings, new student center, etc. The school is now one of the top 40 public schools in the country. The campus is now beautiful (it was dreadful), the infrastructure is state of the art. That doesn't happen without the success in athletics.
So it's a very, very complicated issue.
:mourfacepalm:
aulinhobored:
