(06-01-2017 02:47 PM)arkstfan Wrote: Football is not inherently unaffordable. Athletics in general aren't unaffordable. Most of the members of FBS (P5 and G5 BOTH) could run athletics in the black or with a rounding error of institutional support. If that was important to them.
A P5 could hire a head coach in football for $750,000 if keeping costs down mattered. Now they might only keep him a year and they might not like the pool of candidates as well as the pool when offering $3 million but there are already guys taking pay cuts to become head coaches, if you think a school could be a launch pad, you forego dollars today for lots and lots more tomorrow.
Yes, it isn't inherently unaffordable. And, athletics can definitely sustain themselves. Purdue comes to mind as one of the frugal athletic departments around D1. It runs football at a fraction of its peers in the Big Ten, but, you can spot the difference.
I don't disagree with the institutional concern issue. In Cal, it's not Berkeley, it's with their state handlers. It's a different world out there, but this is one of those issues I hope the rest of the country watches where it is an issue. California is doing what everybody else should be doing with their institutions and their athletic departments. And, even if for nothing else, it's good that this matter is being put under the microscope. At Cal, all of athletics will be looked at; operations getting the full audit. It's possible the conference gets some flack for this, or how the school allowed the conference to negotiate its current deal; pay-dirt was projected/promised, but it was way overstated.
Quote:all the while ignorant of the fact that it is football that pays for itself and that pays the freight for most of the other 29 sports as well
People want it to, oh so badly. It doesn't, really. I know what it can do; what it has the potential of doing (
this article explores beer sales). It doesn't in most places. And how.
And Cal exemplifies this. The stadium is built for football. That's a football-driven expense, and until networks can pay multiple times what schools already make now, how in the ever-loving flip can anyone say "football pays for itself?" At Cal, or any place that has to handle stadium issues, it's the other sports who have to bear the cross of football and the convoluted schemes schools pull to transfer the costs across all of operations. It's a shell-game.
Saying "hey, look at all this money football's bringing in, supporting all of our athletics" is disingenuous. Saying $37 million pays the others' bills is simply false, because football's bills alone aren't covered by that sum. And, clearly, when there are deficits, schools circle their wagons on the other sports for football. No, the failure
is football. The other sports and Title IX just become the scapegoats.