National Collegiate Athletic Association
NCAA News Archive - 2001
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"We can rush to the conclusion that the football coaches are overpaid. We ought to first understand what it is they get paid for.
"One of my daughters attended Oberlin College in Ohio. On a visit there, I took a jog past the athletics facilities, where men and women were playing soccer and softball, lacrosse and field hockey. The football stadium, such as it was, couldn't have held more than 5,000 fans.
"A wonderful scene, but I had to ask myself, 'Who's paying for all these sports?' Then I realized -- duh, I was. Tuition was more than $20,000 a year. At Oberlin, sports were on par with chemistry and classics.
"The University of Washington has an annual athletics budget of more than $30 million. The money to pay for all the sports that men and women compete in doesn't come from tuition. Or the state. It comes from the revenue generated by the football program, more than 80 percent of it, anyway. Last year and thanks to football, the Huskies made $2.6 million running an athletics program, all the while involved in nearly $100 million worth of capital improvements.
"The university and its students benefit from better athletics fields and buildings. A community benefits from not only entertainment, but a sense of belonging and pride. ...
"Coaches are most responsible for success. They are in great demand. And the reality is they are worth what they get. The NCAA tried limiting salaries in basketball a few years ago and lost a court case that cost it $54 million. There is no way to limit salaries institutionally, unless college sports gain an antitrust exemption.
"To outsiders, it has never made sense that a university runs a semi-professional athletics program. In Europe, the Huskies would be a town team where the players are paid.
"But it hasn't been that way here for a hundred years. College football is big business, with a university happy to make use of the profits. We're past wondering why the football coach makes more than the university president or the physics professor.
"He just does."
Sports sponsorship
Kevin Weiberg, commissioner
Big 12 Conference
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Discussing recent cuts in men's teams:
"In the case of the sport drops in the Big 12 this past year, I think they were more budgetary in nature than they were directly related to Title IX. I think Title IX is a factor in those kinds of decisions that are made because, clearly, nobody is discontinuing women's sports in the present environment, and it has a lot to do with the federal law. It does have a role to play in all this, but it's not the primary reason that Iowa State dropped two sports and Kansas dropped two sports. ...
"The discouraging thing about some of our sport drops was that schools were making some adjustments that appeared to be based on future projected problems. For the most part, in my experience, dropping sports has been a measure of last resort, and in these cases, it seemed more like schools were just trying to do a better job of managing their budgets. And that's the thing that I think raises some philosophical and other concerns that we've got to continue to work on."
Al Bohl, athletics director
University of Kansas
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"(Cutting sports) is not a model unique to intercollegiate athletics. We all read the business section. You've read about airlines that are streamlining. It happens at all corporations, and it's a very bitter pill when you have to do things like that.
"How do you come up with the money to (save sports)? You've either got to sell more tickets or raise more money or do what's happened at some schools in the Big 12."
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