NCAA President Cedric W. Dempsey remembers a simpler time when intercollegiate athletics departments were no different than other departments at colleges and universities. Athletics departments submitted expense budgets just like the rest, and any revenues that happened to be generated were returned to the school. At the time, the emphasis was on controlling expenses and not so much on generating revenue.

Those days are gone.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, institutions began to lean more and more on their athletics departments to be self-sufficient. Marketing and promotion grew increasingly important, and the pressure to turn a profit at the gate mounted. Expenses skyrocketed, too, but the climate was right for a boom, and institutions in turn didn't blink at the increased exposure athletics was bringing to their campuses.

"It was an interesting shift," Dempsey said.

It is a shift he worries might have left the educational mission of intercollegiate athletics behind.

That's why Dempsey has been outspoken lately about two of his primary concerns in intercollegiate sports today: the need for athletics leaders to refocus on the educational mission and the desire to control what Dempsey calls an ever-growing "arms race" of spending and building to reach impractical financial goals.

There is evidence to support Dempsey's concerns. The NCAA's latest study of revenues and expenses at Divisions I and II institutions shows that only about 15 percent operate their athletics programs in the black. Granted, many of those are very much in the black, but the vast majority of athletics programs lose almost as much money as the others make. And those deficits are growing year after year.

It also figures that since the age of athletics self-sufficiency began more than 25 years ago, fewer and fewer athletics administrators and coaches come from a background other than marketing, promoting and generating funds in order to survive. And since you can't generate too many funds if you don't field successful teams -- well, you do the math. The pressure to win is at all costs.

Though winning always has been important, Dempsey said the race to spend in order to win puts administrators in a position to base many of their decisions on what generates the most revenue instead of what's best for the student-athlete. It's an at-odds scenario that Dempsey thinks is playing out more frequently now than ever before.

"As sports have become more visible -- and as society has responded affirmatively to sports -- they have been more successful financially," he said. "And as we've gone through an era of prosperity, we've seen that prosperity in high-level programs in the growth of budgets, salaries and facilities.

"We're also seeing a different type of person coming into leadership roles in intercollegiate sports. A large number of coaches and administrators come in without an understanding of the educational mission. I'm not saying that they're not capable people, but the educational mission has not received an appropriate amount of emphasis in recent years."

What is the mission?

College and university presidents have made it clear for years that they're interested in graduating student-athletes. And for the most part, college athletics has been successful in doing that. Though there are pockets of the student-athlete population that do not fare as well as the general student body when it comes time to don the cap and gown, most student-athletes graduate at a higher rate than their student-body peers -- and this has been the case for several years running.

So something must be working.

Others would argue, too, that with increased revenues comes the ability for institutions to provide more student-athlete programming geared toward the athlete's life after college. Take the NCAA CHAMPS/Life Skills program, for example. Most Division I schools have one that caters to the development of the "total" student-athlete and enables those who dream big about athletics to wake up later and survive in a nonathletics world.

Surely that indicates commitment.

But then there's the Knight Commission, which has reconvened because it claims college sports hasn't cleaned up its financial act. There is a forest-eating NCAA Manual that grows annually in order to close legislative loopholes because the haves and have-nots don't trust each other.

And there's a lengthening list of coaches who are released because their win total doesn't measure up to the money pumped into the program. National Association of Basketball Coaches Executive Director Jim Haney said there likely will be about 40 coaching changes in men's basketball programs after this season, most of which will be firings.

What, then, is the mission?

"The relationship between a powerfully positive psychological environment on your team as a goal for the department -- an experience that builds character and respect and self discipline -- versus a set of goals that are win-at-all-costs is a line that all of us walk in big-time athletics," said Stanford University athletics director Ted Leland.

"We need more people in our profession who understand the first set of goals. At the end of the day, the only final justification for college athletics is if it's good for the participants, if it allows them to be better citizens in later life. If we're just a business, then we don't belong on campus."

Leland believes there's been a decline in higher education of the "old physical education schools," where people who wanted to be coaches and administrators were grounded in the philosophy of education.

"Education starts with focus on the life of the mind," he said. "But inevitably, any sound theory of education deals with things besides intellectual growth -- it deals with character, and spiritual and social growth. Not many of our coaches and administrators are coming up grounded in the philosophy that athletics plays a role in the other realm of education that is important in the total development of the person."

Instead, Leland said many are business, marketing and communications majors who come to college and high-school sports with a different set of expectations.

"What can be lost is the commitment to athletics as part of education. Athletics as a business enterprise has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations, but there's a potential that we've lost something," Leland said.

Barbara Hedges, athletics director at the University of Washington, said it's hard, though, to compare today's educational mission with that of 20, 30 or 40 years ago and that perspective is the key.

"Many people in intercollegiate sports today don't have that background, but the reality is that they all graduated from college and have been involved in higher education," Hedges said. "I believe it's important to keep what we do in perspective. If we fit with what's going on with the rest of our campus, we're OK."

The public-service component

The need for athletics to "fit in," as Hedges said, has been at the center of debate almost since the first football was teed up more than 100 years ago.

Football and basketball players are supposed to be no different than their general student-body counterparts. Yet, the need for intercollegiate athletics to provide an entertaining and financially viable show strains that relationship.

Dempsey said the current state of intercollegiate athletics didn't just happen -- it has evolved over time. The commercialization of sports started as early as the late 1800s. Colleges discovered that if they sponsored events and provided the transportation (via train at that time), people would come. And people haven't stopped coming 100 years later.

It's easy to see that colleges and universities have taken note of that commercialization over the decades. Dempsey said athletics departments didn't just decide on their own to try to become booming industries. They were encouraged.

"It's not just the athletics departments' fault for making money -- they were given a charge by the institutions to do it," Dempsey said.

He should know, having worked in both worlds. Dempsey, in fact, experienced both worlds at one school. He worked at the University of Arizona as an assistant athletics director in the 1960s and then returned as the school's athletics director in the 1980s, when he said self-sufficiency had become a major goal.

Dempsey also spent 12 years at the University of the Pacific (California), where the faculty often wondered if the school would be better off running its athletics department as an intramurals program rather than as a Division I endeavor.

"There are basically two reasons we have intercollegiate sports," Dempsey said. "One is the educational benefits that are derived from participation, and two is the public service that athletics provides to an institution. Most colleges have built into their mission education, research and public-service components. How do you justify having athletics as part of higher education?

"We must start with the educational mission. Without a sound educational foundation, it's hard to defend intercollegiate athletics in higher education. An additional justification for athletics, particularly at the highest level, is through the institutional public-service mission."

In other words, institutions not only depend on their athletics departments to be self-sufficient, they depend on their athletics departments to generate revenue for the school in the form of increased admissions and positive public exposure. That can blur the line between sponsoring college sports at their purest level or pumping up the entertainment value to make sure sports generate dollars.

"We've really forced ourselves into a situation of professionalizing the presentation of sports it in such a way that we've either created or recruited a universe of managers who don't have any contact with the educational mission," said Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference Commissioner Charles S. Harris.

Leland agreed.

"We are presenting a more and more lavish athletics experience that sometimes is not in proportion to the rest of the student body," he said, noting that a Stanford faculty member pointed out to him that Stanford's athletics instructional video system is more sophisticated than 95 percent of the school's undergraduate teaching video systems.

"It's our obligation to provide the best we can for our student-athletes, and we shouldn't apologize for that," Leland said. "But at the same time we need to be concerned about how that looks in proportion to the rest of the university."

The arms race

Intercollegiate athletics isn't the only entity caught up in an arms race. Hedges pointed out that at Washington, five major construction projects were underway and none had to do with the athletics department, a scenario common at many institutions.

"There is a building boom in higher education," Hedges said. "Athletics is no different from the rest of the campus."

Part of the reason for the boom in athletics is what Dempsey referred to as an age of prosperity. That prosperity has been inflated by wealthy boosters and larger endowments. Also, fans are willing to pay higher ticket prices because they have the disposable income. And no one is telling athletics departments not to spend. It leads to a mentality of having to spend to keep up with the other guy so as to not lose any competitive advantage.

In the "old days" of college football at least -- before scholarship limits were in place -- there was an arms race of a different kind. Affluent schools granted scholarships to more players than their opponents could. It was common for football rosters to exceed 100 players at big-time institutions. That's where excess money went then.

"But when scholarship limits came in, that's when athletics became opulent," Leland said.

The dollars that couldn't be spent on scholarships went toward what institutions believed could give them a leg up elsewhere -- newer, state-of-the-art facilities to attract recruits and higher salaries to attract name coaches.

"It's the way of the world," Leland said.

American Football Coaches Association Executive Director Grant Teaff said it's not because coaches created it, either. "From a financial standpoint, the market seems to create itself. I don't know of any coach who has demanded a million dollars," Teaff said.

But it has snowballed into a "keeping-up with-the-Joneses" mentality, according to Harris.

"We decided to let the majority set the standards," he said. "And (the opulence) doesn't trickle down to the rest of the athletics program, either. It's an indication that what we are doing is refining the elements of our major properties in ways to make them more commercially viable. At some point in time, that will be at the expense of the educational mission."

Interestingly, Haney said any competitive drive in the revenues/expenses chain is a natural fallout of the psychological makeup of athletics personnel. Most of those people excelled in college sports and are competitive by nature. It follows then that they would want the best for their programs, and for their student-athletes.

"Some of these things are just a result of having people who have excelled -- they're not going to suddenly turn it off," he said.

But Dempsey at least wants people to consider turning it down. "Can we come up with a financial model -- perhaps even as part of the certification process -- that will efficiently deal with expenses?" he asked.

"We've not done a very good job of controlling expenses. Obviously, the cost-reduction approach that we've used in the last decade is not necessarily the way to go in curtailing the arms race."

Critics might point to the NCAA as not walking the walk, either. After all, here's an organization that signed a $6 billion television-rights contract with CBS last year.

Dempsey maintains, however, that those funds help reduce what the majority of schools' athletics programs lose. Plus, the Association has added hundreds of championships opportunities for student-athletes -- many of which are in women's sports -- over the past decade.

"The growth in funds has been used to assist schools and provide increased and enhanced opportunities for student-athletes," Dempsey said. "More than 90 percent of the contract dollars are returned."

Moving forward

So if no one is to blame for the way things are, who can be expected to do something about it?

Dempsey believes it has to start at the top of senior leadership on each campus.

"We need to start with the presidents involved," he said. "They need to understand what the mission of athletics is in higher education. We begin that by trying to engage governing boards, presidential associations and our own membership in some sort of process to refocus on educational goals.

"It will require a change in culture. I heard one of our members say recently that the role of intercollegiate athletics is about competitive balance more than educational goals. If people believe that's true, then we'll have a tough time justifying sports on campus."

That change in culture may even include boards of trustees, which at many institutions are involved in hiring athletics personnel and setting financial goals and expectations. They, too, are responsible in many cases for increasing the pressure to win.

Some trustees in fact use the athletics arena as a political forum and aren't shy about saying who the next football or basketball coach should be.

At the very least, Dempsey challenges institutions to self-evaluate their attentiveness to the real mission of intercollegiate sports. "Very seldom do you see questions even raised about institutions' educational philosophy anymore and how athletics fits into higher education," he said.

"I'm not necessarily saying we have, but if we have lost sight of the academic mission, then as a profession we need to refocus on that," said University of Florida athletics director Jeremy Foley. "If nothing else, the perception of the problem causes us to look inward and make sure that the educational mission is our primary focus. That's a good challenge on Ced's part."

"A significant role all of us should play," Harris said, "is that while we're charged with making athletics better, we're also supposed to preserve the qualities that made athletics special in the first place so that the best values and the best qualities of the whole spirit of athletics competition are around 100 years from now.

"I'm not a pessimist, but I don't see this cycle being able to sustain itself for any continuous period of time. So some meaningful dialogue is essential."

Leland agrees, noting that athletics administrators need to recognize that one, there is a problem, and two, they need to talk about it.

"We need to use the bully pulpit to get people thinking about this because right now it's not on a lot of people's radar screens," he said. "Our biggest threat comes from our own campuses and how they relate to the size and strength of our departments. If we're not careful, we're going to implode in college athletics."

Dempsey said it's not easy to change the culture, especially when the majority doesn't perceive there's a crisis.

Chances are that it would be hard to get most people today to agree that there is a crisis in intercollegiate sports with the cash flow being what it is.

But Dempsey believes that a hard look to the past might be the best thing for the future of intercollegiate athletics.