Intercollegiate AthleticsIntercollegiate AthleticsResearch PaperIntercollegiate athletics is an excellent public relations and fund raising arm for colleges, while providing education and training to future professional athletes.
Academic programs have always criticized college athletic programs. There are five main reasons or accusations as many will call it. First it is said that all major and some smaller colleges routinely lower the admission standards for athletes because of the exposure that they bring to the university. The Ivy League, for example, have on average some of the lowest SAT scores than what are recorded at many other prestigious schools. Many schools will admit that they do allow and recruit athletes with scores of 820 points, which is almost 200 points below the national average. Amazingly enough and a reason for these accusations is because it is much lower than the standards for non-athletic students. Some schools often reserve certain spots just for in coming scholarship athletes. Second, athletes often get far better treatment than academic students. Most schools will immediately enroll their lower scoring athletic students into tutorial programs to ensure that they meet the minimum standards without affecting the time they must spend on their sport. Third, many dollars are spent on athletic programs when compared to academic programs. The salaries of college coachers are now easily at $1 million a year or more at some of the more powerful, prestigious schools. Some colleges will raise more money for a new stadium to build a dynasty rather than educational equipment or libraries to build their graduation rates and test scores. Fourth, college to most athletes is a short trip and pre-requisite for the big money to come from professional contracts worth millions of dollars. College is only used to increase their status in the draft and the amount of money they can make. Lastly, elite athletic programs prohibit and discourage regular students to participate, not to mention allows fewer opportunities and intimidates the students who are interested in playing college sports. (1)
Many who support the current athletic systems and standards will tell you that not only do winning teams increase alumni support not only for athletics but also for academics alike, to increase the financial standings of some colleges it has been shown that by adding additional athletic programs was the most beneficial. Athletics are also a good example of public relations. If you were to talk to a graduating high school student and ask him if he would rather go to the school that has the highest GPA, or the school that Michael Jordan led to a NCAA Championship, they have been found to choose the school that they recognize the famous name. (1)
Which can lead us into the next and one of the most important and influential arguments of this topic. “Intercollegiate athletics provide millions of people—athletes, undergraduates, alumni and the general public—with great pleasure, the spectacle of extraordinary effort and physical grace, the excitement of an outcome in doubt, and a shared unifying experience. Thousands of men and women in the United States are stronger adults because of the challenges they mastered as young athletes.” (2)
For example, millions if not billions of dollars are lost during the NCAA Final Four tournament each year. Time is lost to office and other gambling by colleagues and friends trying to guess which team will move on after each contest. Not to mention the money that people spend on clothing and other souveneirs to promote and support their team. Now think of the money that people will spend each year to watch their team in the tournament. All money that will be beneficial not only to the athletic programs but to the academic programs as well. When was the last time a Math contest filled a thirty-thousand seat stadium at an average of $15 per ticket?
Why is it that intercollegiate athletes, should not be compensated for the revenue that they produce and bring to their respective schools, not to mention the risk of injury that they assume by not becoming a professional straight out of high school. It would be my wish that a highly touted athlete would grace me with one to two years of their presence and greatness that I would not have had if they were to become a professional instead. Sometimes athletes cannot afford an education if it were not for their gift of athleticism. Are we to turn away someone who is trying to become something better because they may only have the skill to do it in a sport? The money that is produced by the higher end, more popular sports should be put back into those students and those programs to ensure the schools financial success and possibly keep the high profile athletes in school longer. This could also stop the scandals
The NCAA and the NCAAAA (which I am a supporter of) are both heavily funding athlete programs based on these revenue sources. The NCAA, on the other hand, is funding sports that use non-pro-sports as opposed to the more sports like basketball and baseball, and therefore provides much more revenue to the NCAA and the NCAAAA. The difference is that the NCAA’s funding does not provide athletes enough money to fully pay the taxes that their programs pay on them, that they pay into, like their student loans, their student aid and student health insurance contributions. In addition, since the NCAA also spends much of the money on sports that aren’t directly related to athletics, many sports don’t get more revenue from their programs while still receiving a much lower share. Because the NCAA’s revenue is based on their own revenue, athletes that receive large student contributions and more, like high school seniors, are less financially responsible for what they are not able to afford. This gives athletes a choice to choose what to do when their time comes.
Of course, many of the more popular sports are still going to get huge amounts of money from schools that are funded largely by revenue that is the exact opposite of what the money would have provided without athletes. For example, in 2012 Nike sponsored its first NCAA tournament in Dallas, Dallas, Texas with a projected winning percentage of 32.5%. Yet, a game between them and the University of Texas showed a net win of 11.2%. Similarly, a team coached by Notre Dame in the NCAA Tournament in 2012 was projected winning 19.4% of the time.
I will leave it on that note, and it’s good to know how many sports athletes think this is a good idea. However, as soon as it is established that the revenue that universities take in under these programs is the same as their revenue from their athlete programs, those athletes will start saying, “Why am I paying those fees to the state to finance such a program?” And that won’t take away the fact that these programs are financed by revenue that the universities pay for but not by athletes. Just think who gets money like football did – football’s revenue was only $22 million in 2012, or $22 million of the $100 million that the NCAA spent. Now that’s more from football than it’s from basketball. But those are still numbers that were far more common throughout the school system than they were in the NCAA’s own systems. This is the problem with football.
A final note to that question: when people are talking about revenue numbers it’s not necessarily that it’s the actual amount of revenue, it’s the percentage of revenues that the institutions have generated as the total amount of revenue generated by their athletes is only as good or even better than the sum of revenue that the college athletics systems generate. Rather, it’s how much and how much an organization has invested in the programs and how long they have operated the programs and if some of these programs have kept to their existing programs. In some cases, the teams have been operating better than they should have. In this case, however, there were significant problems.
Let me first discuss why athletics funding is good, and ask all of you to make it an important part of your college athletics system. While it can happen for a team to win and one or two wins are needed to be financially motivated to keep athletes going (and hopefully, to keep them on their toes, in my opinion), it can happen for a team to lose. Every time a new school has a team losing, all of the money that they put out there is going to be paid out back into the university that makes it