Joe Castiglione, director of athletics
University of Oklahoma
Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal

"People are going to laugh, but I really think that almost everything in this state is better when football is successful. The economy, certainly as it relates to products, goods and services around the university, is better. People around the state are happier. The air even smells cleaner."

Doug Dickey, director of athletics
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal

"Probably only the top 50 to 55 schools in America are financially able to run their programs in a somewhat similar nature to an NFL program, in that they are pushing the business side of things. The rest are kind of in a system -- they get a lot of help from their schools and they don't get much TV money, marketing money or postseason money."

Jeremy Foley, director of athletics
University of Florida
Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal

"Someone might look at us and say, 'Well, 85 scholarships is too many,' and other people might say, 'What are you doing paying your head football coach $2 million a year?' And while everyone is entitled to their opinion, 85 scholarships is what the profession -- and I mean the NCAA and its members -- thinks is necessary for the sport. And at the University of Florida, paying Steve Spurrier what we pay him is what we think we need to be successful."

Jim Delany, commissioner
Big Ten Conference
Street & Smith's SportsBusiness Journal

"One one level, you could have tremendous success, commercial or otherwise. You could be graduating players, you could be avoiding probation and you might argue that football isn't undermining anything -- it's bringing people together. But on the other hand, you could have the competitive success but you could be sitting right next to some really bad academic performance, and you could say that's sending the wrong message. Then you also could have a situation where there's no competitive success, no academic success and an institutional subsidy, which you could say makes football look worse.

"So you can't make a general statement about it and put it around 110-plus institutions. You've got to say, 'Does it work for that institution?' "

Preseason workouts

Michael Grant, strength and conditioning coach
Mississippi State University
Chronicle of Higher Education

"That's a hard book to judge, what's too much. It's a really big gray area. It's our job to push and motivate these kids further than they've ever been pushed or motivated before. I really don't know what's pushing them too far. You just sort of have to have a gut feeling."

Lee McElroy, director of athletics
State University of New York at Albany
Chronicle of Higher Education

"When you talk to people in the football programs that won the last eight or 10 national championships, they tell you all about what they did in the summers -- they lifted together, ran together, did their offensive schemes together -- they did everything together. They're all together, and their goal is to be ranked in the top 25, to get to a bowl game, to win a national championship. It's all goal, goal, goal, goal, goal. Is there some balance? Is it healthy to continue such intense activity for so long?"

Health and safety

Gary Green, team physician
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles Times

Graduation rates

Jim Haney, executive director
National Association of Basketball Coaches
USA Today

Discussing how transfers and other attrition count toward calculating graduation rates:

"That's where things start to get fuzzy. We're not really in a position to properly assess who's doing it right. (Still), you've got to be concerned about 24 percent -- that's less than one out of every four African-American basketball players graduating. If it's because of the transfers, because of the guys leaving early (for the NBA), we need to know that. We all have a responsibility to try to find out why. Then we've got to come up with solutions."