Athletics Spending (Jeff Hankins Editor’s Note)

When I heard our staff was working on a cover story about college athletics spending in Arkansas, I immediately knew it would be candy for a number of people.

Among them: outraged college faculty, legislators, anyone who doesn’t see much value in intercollegiate athletics, the University of Arkansas, most of the Arkansas media and certainly many more.

I have all kinds of strikes against myself in terms of my biases on the subject. I’m an Arkansas State University graduate and contributor, general college sports enthusiast and fraternity guy, but not a tenured faculty member or typical member of the media.

I’ll admit not being the least bit happy about athletic programs like ASU that operate with deficits. But nor am I happy about:

• The extraordinary amounts of money being poured into athletics nationwide. The University of Florida spends almost $60 million annually and the University of Oklahoma spends nearly $50 million.

• The rules imposed by the NCAA that routinely benefit the big conferences and universities and squeeze out smaller programs.

• The federal government’s Title IX requirements that have forced enormous amounts of spending on new women’s programs that have no revenue support and little demand. (There are also men’s program that have no revenue support or demand but are required to meet the NCAA rules.)

• The outrageous inflation rate for higher education that is more than twice the traditional Consumer Price Index. Because so much athletic spending is tied directly to scholarships, skyrocketing tuition costs have artificially inflated what schools are actually spending on athletic program activities.

• What’s fascinating is how “major” college programs — like the University of Arkansas, according to Mark Friedman’s story in Arkansas Business — across the country keep making life harder on smaller programs. Programs like the UA and everyone else in the Southeastern Conference desperately need the University of Louisiana at Monroe and ASU programs of the country to chalk up some easy wins to appease fans and donors, give coaches job security and earn the big-money bowl game trips.

Here’s an idea: Let’s wipe out all but the 50 largest football programs in the country. We’ll be paying head coaches $1 million a year to deliver 7-5 records on top of the $2 million buyout package for the last head coach who couldn’t fight the odds of winning a national championship. The big boys will just beat up one another and cry about difficult nonconference schedules.

Enough about that.

Value in Athletics

What do Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Vanderbilt have in common? All are world-class institutions of higher learning that have enormous endowments and reputations. They also have athletic programs because they see value in intercollegiate athletics.

A key issue for the state of Arkansas or any other state is that with higher education underfunded, does it make sense to allow colleges to incur athletic deficits? I think the answer is yes because of the marketing exposure for the institution, the contribution to a student’s college experience, the opportunity it gives to students who otherwise might not be able to attend college, the jobs created, the tax revenue generated through sports-related hospitality spending and the ability of athletics to draw to campus alumni who otherwise wouldn’t visit.

When the Arkansas General Assem-bly instituted its arbitrary $750,000 cap on state funds that could be spent on athletics during the early 1990s, it applied the same amount to every college in Arkansas without regard to size of its budget, number of students, level of the program or anything else. The cap has never changed, yet the cost of an athletic scholarship just in the last five years has grown 42 percent because of tuition increases and all the schools have been forced to expand spending in women’s program under Title IX requirements.

If the cap had been adjusted each year for higher education inflation — that’s roughly 6.5 percent, if you can believe it — that cap would stand at $1.4 million today. While not proposing that we do this, I do think that $750,000 figure needs a little perspective and we need to revisit the one-size-fits-all approach.

The bottom line is that athletics spending deserves healthy debate, but it doesn’t need to be oversimplified and we can’t isolate and punish Arkansas institutions without looking at the national picture and forces that are not under our control.

(Jeff Hankins can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].)