(05-19-2020 02:07 AM)BruceMcF Wrote:  

(05-18-2020 01:46 PM)The Cutter of Bish Wrote:  To me, I could buy into the value of having these programs if schools could just qualify and quantify their value; articulate it even a little.

That's my point: it's something that is quantifiable. It can't be quantified by chewing the fat on a discussion forum, but it CAN be quantified.

Quote: When you know the school is bleeding because of a sport, and the media money doesn’t even come close to covering the tab, I don’t for the life of me understand why schools aren’t all about emphasizing how that value presents.

It seems likely it's because they don't want to risk finding out that the answer doesn't flatter the sports subsidy.

It's not as if the (actual) spending on the sports subsidy is the biggest source of losses at a University like Akron ... that would be the padding of administrative positions in the ongoing empire building games of college administrators.

After all, a $25m contribution from a University with an enrollment of around 15,000 and $31,000 full time tuition (the reduced tuition in-state represents the additional state subsidy to in-state students, so it just redirects where some of that $31,000 comes from) is about 5.4% of tuition revenue. Waste on administrative feather bedding and empire building is going to be in the double digits.

Quote: Like, are you seeing increased giving on game days? Apps from prospective students saying they wanted to come there because they saw them on ESPN?

That would be mostly anecdotal, but a good quantitative marketing firm could do targeted surveys of prospective high school graduates and their parents and get a reasonably good estimate of how it impacts the decision of the marginal accepted student whether to enroll at Akron or somewhere else.

My guess would be if they actually did that, the answer would be having Division 1 basketball and a nationally respected soccer program gives them approximately the same impact as their current entire sports set-up, and they could cut football entirely for a substantial net gain. But that's just a guess ... you have to actually do the study to find out.

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(05-18-2020 08:12 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  In any event, my statements were a fair inference from what you say you meant, because if Akron is surrounded by higher-profile FBS programs, that implies that they might sink further into obscurity as an FCS/D1sub, and thus might struggle to achieve the marketing benefits of athletics at that level, which would translate into lower tangible revenues like ticket sales, etc. (wheras say an FCS like North Dakota State, not having any FBS powers in proximity, might have an easier time building a high profile program with the resulting benefits) thus requiring a higher subsidy than the average FCS/D1Sub. So it was good that I compared them to some similar FCS/D1sub programs that are currently in that same boat.

Sorry, I am not used to the "sentence X in post #N" comparison as opposed to just copy and paste and wrap in {quote}{/quote}, I was looking at the wrong sentence.

For that sentence, Dayton and X are not in the same boat because they have BUILT their profile in the Southwest Ohio media markets ... where college basketball rules the roost because there is no local NBA team. Literally 50% of an "In-Ohio FCS average" comparison and 33% of an "In-Ohio NFS average" are schools that are quite obviously NOT in the same boat. Akron would be in the Cleveland State, Wright State, Youngstown boat, not in the Dayton Flyers, Xavier boat, but the "Ohio FCS" and "Ohio NFS" averages don't allow segregating things that way.

The national averages are much better for smoothing out the impacts of the outliers.

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(05-17-2020 02:38 PM)bullet Wrote:  And the incremental costs of athletes cannot be assumed to be zero. There is a huge tutoring/mentoring component. I know people involved with that at a major school. There are mandatory study halls. There are tutors for each subject. There are note takers. There are attendance takers. There are general tutors for things like time management. There are coordinators who interface with the coaches. Its a lot. There is the training table. In some universities, they are a large component of certain academic programs. Those academic programs might not exist if they weren't doing football.

Except only the last part is part of the general University budget. That's part of why I didn't assume zero incremental general education costs, but rather 20%-40%. There are gut classes in the humanities and social sciences that engineering students seek out so they have more time to spend on their engineering classes ... I'll happily bet that there are FB and Basketball players in those same classes.

The dedicated "keep the scholarship FB and BBall players from academic probation" infrastructure is part of what was assumed to be funded by the $3m+ from buy games and MAC distribution and ticket sales (which are listed in descending order of size ... Akron gets more from the MAC than they get from people attending their sporting contests). If that is a net (-$1m) rather than $0 for the subsidy, add $1m to the saving of scrapping football.

I'm not just talking about "A" classes in humanities. I'm also talking about entire degree programs like "Sports management."