(02-06-2020 11:18 AM)Illini60940 Wrote: (02-06-2020 10:59 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote: (02-06-2020 05:54 AM)XLance Wrote: (02-05-2020 11:14 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote: (02-05-2020 09:52 AM)esayem Wrote: I think there are certain advantages being associated with private schools. I don’t see that going away.
Absolutely! The Big Ten schools WANT the association with Northwestern.
By the same token, why is there an assumption that private schools would be less likely to participate in a pay for play environment? If anything, the Power Five private schools as a whole are among the wealthiest institutions in the nation. Taking Northwestern as an example, they could pay for its athletes with essentially a day’s worth of interest on its endowment. At the same time, they use their association with the Big Ten and its association with big-time athletics in its recruiting for academic students against the Ivy League and University of Chicago. Northwestern wants to maintain its association with the Big Ten as much as the Big Ten wants to keeps its association with them.
The association with big-time athletics is even more important for the schools just below the Northwestern/Duke academic tier, such as Wake Forest and Boston College. They’re competing for students against the likes of Emory, Boston University, Northeastern and Davidson, so their ACC membership is a significant selling tool.
I’ve always stated that this forum often overrates enrollment of non-flagship/non-top research public universities and underrates top rated private schools, particularly those directly located in key markets (e.g. Chicago, Boston, Miami, Nashville, etc.).
I don’t think anyone in a P5 conference is EVER going to unilaterally downgrade regardless of the rules. When push comes to shove, Northwestern will absolutely pay to play if necessary because it’s just as much about competing for top academic students against Harvard and the University of Chicago as it is about competing against Michigan and Ohio State for top football recruits. The people paying $80,000 per year for tuition and room and board at places like Duke, Northwestern and Vandy absolutely want that big-time athletic atmosphere to distinguish themselves from the Ivy League.
Before the BTN Northwestern had contemplated approaching the Ivy.
The ACC had developed an expansion scenario that targeted Northwestern and Vanderbilt.
Presidents talk. They are looking for institutional fit, not total gross revenue of their potential partners. What they are looking for is a chance for their athletic teams to compete against peers.
In the long run, the B1G my want to associate with Northwestern, but Northwestern may choose to associate with schools that look more like them.
Northwestern thought about the Ivy League back in the 1980s, which might as well be the 1880s when it comes to how television revenue and branding is in today's world.
You're absolutely correct that the presidents are looking for institutional fit, but the supposition that the other Big Ten school don't "look" like Northwestern is based on a superficial public/private delineation. The Big Ten is still made up of many of the top academic research schools in the country. When it comes to actual academic research, Michigan can compete with any Ivy League school (and bests many of them) in any department and even schools like Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio State and Purdue blow most of the Ivy League away in engineering.
I'd agree that Northwestern has a ton in common with Stanford, Duke and Vanderbilt as top tier private research universities in the P5. However, when you get past the public/private delineation, Northwestern actually doesn't have that much in common as an institution with Notre Dame, Boston College or Wake Forest. When it comes to the way schools look at themselves academically, Michigan is a heck of a lot more like Northwestern than Notre Dame is.
The distinction between being a private or public school is certainly relevant, but it's also not an automatic outcome determinative definition of institutional fit the way that a lot of people here seem to make it, either.
Great post!
Looking back 40 years one can always count on the same outcomes. Looking forward just a few years the picture is quite different. While I'm not one who thinks Northwestern is going anywhere, funding is only going to become more crucial than it was in the 1980's. There is a big dip in college age population looming, state funds are much tighter than they were in the 80's, and federal funds are too.
You are going to see venerated schools making decisions you would never have thought possible, and yes the state flagships and land-grant schools are going to cluster and grow as the schools that sprang up under the GI Bill, grew under the Boomers, and looked solid under the X'ers start to be consolidated, retooled, or absorbed in larger state systems and small privates and JUCO's either close or are retooled.
I brought this up 7 years ago and nobody thought it possible, and yet we are in the late early stages of this already.
This is why all revenue streams, even sports revenue, are going to be important to keeping the image of the larger schools before prospective students, important to the appearance of health and University as expected, which means all of those minor non-revenue sports being maintained from the proceeds of the revenue sports, and keeping shrinking donor bases involved.
If you worked with fundraising for the past 40 years you have witnessed the best vested generation of this country pass already, the WWII group. The were raised before the advent of the credit industry, owned what they owned (no mortgages, no car payments, no student loans) and were by and large independent businessmen and businesswomen. They gave to the institutions they loved and revered them because they saw them as major parts in the holding together of a society under duress.
By 2035 statistically the Boomers will have passed. The grew up with consumer credit, car loans, and student debt, but worse they grew up with something their parents tended not to suffer from, the need to keep up their image and stay up with the Joneses. The average Boomer, though vested enough from the inheritances they gleaned from their parents, enter retirement with debt, not NET debt but with debt. What they will pass on to their children will be worth less than what their parents passed onto them. And their numbers inflated everything so that the X'ers they produced have suffered from the inflation for most of their lives and owe far more than their parents did. Millennials may well see a period of deflation in their lives in the not too distant future. Unemployment numbers have been greatly aided in part by Boomer retirements. But the over impact of this will be two or three decades of flat charitable giving and even the number of wealthy donors giving to their alma maters is in decline.
The rise of corporate grants brings with it some legal snares as to intellectual property.
So all revenue streams are going to be prized, but none so much as those without strings, and media revenue other than the sale of sports rights, is one of those.
So Xlance the schools are gong to be very concerned with total revenue numbers, not so much each others as their own. But associating with peers means a synergy and athletic revenue figures is a strong indication of donor strength, attendance and gate related revenue, and the ability of that school's fan base to augment your revenue in competition. It is much nicer to have full venues than not, and is much more likely to attract the attention of TV networks who like such things.
So if Texas or Oklahoma look around for a new home, success will be the greatest aphrodisiac, because they all are image conscious now, which they absolutely weren't 40 years ago when the only broadcast image they saw was on ABC and then only a dozen or so games were shown and only a dozen or so top programs might be shown in any given year because of it.
Stocks are very similar to sports. If you look at what performed well in the last 20 years it might give you a trend. But if you look at the coming demographic shifts you'll be a lot better prepared for a future return, than if you look at the companies who were profitable in 80's or 90's or even the 00's. .