The unofficial online home for fans of the UAB Blazers. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

What people need to know about Andy Schwartz is that he is passionate about educating everyone about the difference in methodologies between those used for college sports accounting and those appropriate doing an economic cost benefit analysis of college sports. If you want to understand the differences read Andy's easy to understand article, "Parable of the Donut Shop" at http://sportsgeekonomics.tumblr.com/post...donut-shop.

What Andy wants people to understand is that the NCAA has put pressure on their member universities and colleges to set up their cost accounting systems to exaggerate the costs of their sports programs. (Cost accounting refers to the way internal units within an organization charge each other for good and services. It is very different from the accounting of how the organization interacts financially with the outside world. In my opinion there is a lot more leeway in cost accounting because it is to a more sheltered from the scrutiny of outside auditors and the IRS. An organization can set up internal accounting to achieve specific results. They are not allowed to do that in the "real" world accounting.)

Andy has testified before US Congressional committees on the subject and he was a key witness for the plaintiffs in the O’Bannon vs. NCAA case in which determined that college athletes are entitled to financial compensation for the NCAA's commercial uses of their images. Aside from arguing that paying players for the use of their images would would destroy amateurism in college athletics, the NCAA argued that their member institutions simply could not afford the additional costs. Andy was able to successfully debunk that argument in court.

I think what initially interested Andy in the UAB situation was that the fact in their report on UAB football, Carr and Associates use the same misleading cost accounting which Andy has preached against to help Watts cut the football program. In addition he found that the Carr Report also contained blatant mistakes and omissions, all slanted to put UAB in the worst possible economic light.

Andy sense of fairness was deeply offended and he spoke out in a series of articles which greatly helped our cause. And the rest is history. Andy at one time shared with me that one of his weakness is saying too much in the public domain, that it some times cost his firm business. That was certainly the case here. Watts disqualified OSKR precisely because Andy "spoke out" publicly against the Carr report long before he had any skin in the game.

You should also know that Andy and OSKR did not profit much financially from putting together their 150+ page report. The firm greatly discounted their normal rates in order to be able to do the work because it was "the right thing to do".

I think that you can understand why Andy is now one of my heroes.

Thanks for sharing Cajun. Andy rocks for standing up for injustive.

Also, there is no "t" in his name, haha.

Cajun, I corrected Andy's name in the subject line. Just a heads up if you were wondering what I edited in your initial post.

(04-24-2015 03:45 PM)UABslant Wrote:  Cajun, I corrected Andy's name in the subject line. Just a heads up if you were wondering what I edited in your initial post.

Appreciate it - never could spell, but this time I blaming it all on the spell checker that didn't catch it......or at least didn't boink me on head until I fixed it.