How many millions has your university lost on athletics?
Debunking the financial myths about college sports
Early Saturday morning, two weeks ago, my son called for me from his room. He is three years old, proud of his “big boy bed” that allows him to crawl in and out if he needs to pee during the night. But he still lies there every morning until I come get him, and typically that means a snuggle before we go downstairs.
That day he surprised me by bursting into our football cheer as soon as I walked through the door. My grandfather was born in Nebraska, and I’ve been cheering for the Big Red since I was young. That loyalty deepened after I completed my two graduate degrees at the University of Nebraska. It’s been a fun tradition to pass along to my son, and we were looking forward to the first game of the season later that morning as Nebraska took on Northwestern in Dublin, Ireland.
Some hours later, after Nebraska found another way to lose a game by three points, I felt like hell. In moments like these I see the spectacle of college athletics for what it is: a billion-dollar entertainment industry that is often the perfect enemy of intellectual life.
Nothing represents the topsy turvy priorities of higher education or the tyranny of branding more than college football. According to a 2019 ESPN report, the highest paid employee in 40 out of 50 states is a college coach. In 2019, Scott Frost made $5 million, five times more than the president of the university and nearly 48 times more than the governor of Nebraska. No wonder that a favorite joke of faculty at Nebraska, even when the team is good, is that the “N” on the stadium stands for “knowledge.”
I often think that my ex, who wears this T-shirt on game days, has a healthier attitude.
If higher education is a business, there is no analogue in industry to the tenuous relationship between academics and athletics at most universities. Maybe manufacturing ammunition in the United States and selling it to other countries who use it against American troops on the battlefield comes close. But typically a healthy business avoids investing in two products that oppose each other.
According to this 2019 report, most universities lose money on athletics. There are only 25 profitable Division I programs; the rest lose roughly $16 million every year. All of the schools in Division II or Division III have consistently reported financial losses from athletics over the past 16 years. Division III colleges and universities like my former employer have lost more, on average, over time despite the prevailing attitude that colleges simply can’t survive without sports. According to the NCAA, Division III schools lost $1.6 million on athletics, on average, in 2005. By 2020 that annual deficit — the true cost of Division III athletics — had grown to $3.9 million. This seems bonkers in a climate where the only thing parents seem to care about is the return on investment in their child’s degree. As my friend Bob likes to say, how many world-class researchers or writers — Nobel and Pulitzer winners — could be supported by $16 million a year at a flagship university? I know, I know, those professors wouldn’t be drawing huge television contracts to partially offset their cost. Even so, the scale of spending on athletics in a climate of faculty layoffs and hiring freezes is obscene.
College athletics at an elite level is a game of financial roulette. When a program succeeds — makes it to a championship, bowl, or postseason tournament — the gains are enormous. But the cost of failure is even steeper. Firing a football coach typically requires millions for a contract buyout, then more millions to hire the next coach. Those costs affect the invisible people in athletic programs — the marketing and communications directors, the office staff who see their pay frozen for years — and the impact of a multi-million dollar loss ripples through the whole university system. If this is so, then why all the Sturm and Drang about academic programs that might struggle with consistent enrollment, but that cost a fraction of what a football team does?
Administrators see athletics as a game that they must play in an age obsessed with branding and marketing. Many small colleges have football programs because it’s a surefire way to recruit men, who are increasingly opting out of postsecondary education. And it’s true that graduation rates for athletes continue to rise. However, youth sports are dominated by wealthy kids, and athletic programs often help already privileged students gain access to elite universities. Investing in education is a far better way than athletics to broaden horizons for all.
If the human damage from predators like Jerry Sandusky or Larry Nassar cannot move the hearts of college leaders, maybe the liability that they represent can. The settlements in the Nassar case totaled roughly 37% of Michigan State University’s operating budget. Settlements from the Sandusky case — $237 million — have hamstrung academic programs for more than a decade at Penn State. It’s the scale of the enterprise that creates these risks. Once an athletic program becomes too big to fail in the eyes of university administrators, a single individual can hurt a lot of people before the truth comes out. This may well be why 1 in 4 college athletes report sexual abuse from coaches, trainers, or doctors. Or why NCAA athletes, themselves, are 3X more likely than other students to be found guilty of sex offenses. Why is such suffering the cost of doing business in higher ed?
It’s not sport, itself, that’s the problem. It’s a question of priorities: how resources and time are allocated. The 1981 film Chariots of Fire promotes a view of athletics that now seems laughably quaint. Harold Abrahams is an undergraduate at Cambridge, where he also distinguishes himself as a sprinter. The university administrators frown when he “plays the tradesman” by hiring a professional coach to help him train for the Olympics. There is a lot of class snobbery wrapped up in their view (he’s not acting like a gentleman). But it’s hard to argue with their notion that professional athletics and professional academics contradict one another.
At Cambridge (according to the film), scholarship comes first, and a balanced person approaches athletics as an amateur: for the love of it, not for wealth or glory. This is at least nominally the philosophy of NCAA Division III, which prohibits participating schools from offering athletic scholarships. But even when I taught at a Division III school, I never saw a student-athlete choose class over a game.
Some of my close friends are coaches, and I came to apply many of their mentoring strategies to my teaching. One of them preached to his wrestlers that excellence was not a switch that they could flip on and off. If they didn’t come to class prepared, sit in the front row, and participate, then they weren’t acting like champions. It’s a favorite maxim of fitness instructors and motivational speakers: how you do anything is how you do everything. But let’s not kid ourselves. The Division I athlete cannot possibly approach academics with the same devotion that they pour into their sport. And this mentality trickles down even to student-athletes in less competitive divisions.
What we have in America is the perfect inverse of the Cambridge model: the athlete who sees academics as the amateur pastime (and even then without the love that defines the word “amateur”). Tom Farrey makes a good case in this op-ed for replacing varsity teams with club sports. Nearly all of the benefits of physical activity, competition, and belonging would remain, but the financial risks, mental health toll, and commercial exploitation of student-athletes would be greatly reduced.
Given all this, why do I still root for the Huskers? I cheer for the team because I remember watching games with my grandfather in his basement, where I’d curl up under a quilt on the couch. He was born in a predominantly Czech community, and following the team helped him feel connected to those roots. Even now, players like Travis Vokolek and Teddy Prochazka look like they could have walked out of a Moravian wheatfield. When I watched games with my father, it was a rare moment of peace between us, common ground we otherwise struggled to find. In all of these memories, Big Red is synonymous with love.
Years later, I returned to Nebraska as a graduate student. The year was 1997, the quarterback was Scott Frost, and the team won the national title. A friend of mine had season tickets and gave them to me for one of the throwaway games, and my father and grandfather drove 20 hours on short notice to join me that Saturday. Small wonder that when the team hired Frost as their head coach after I’d married into a Penn State family, that I’d feel a surge of nostalgia for those days.
Anyone who cares deeply about a team is rooting for more than a win on the field. There are no professional teams in Nebraska, and even if the people of that fine state could find a better measure of their worth (say, the work of Willa Cather), a good football season is one way to feel that the Midwest matters as more than a fountain of food. Slipping into my red T-shirt is like wrapping myself in my grandfather’s quilt, and holding my son in my lap for the opening kickoff is a reminder of times when I felt loved as a child. That’s a strong enough reason to keep the tradition alive despite all my doubts about the scale and priorities of the athletic enterprise. But it’s one of those unreconciled contradictions I brood over, like the pile of cardboard I set out at the curb for recycling each week or the clothing I wear that has externalized costs.
Some say that fandom is like religion, and that is equally true of the hope that springs eternal on game day and of a powerful institution’s potential for great harm. But when my team is doing poorly, I reflect bitterly that nearly every religious tradition is built on some form of redemption that its followers can claim even in their lowliest state. The sad fact of college athletics is that grace and restoration are the last things a school can offer when it has squandered millions of dollars that taxpayers, families, and alumni gave in good faith.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments or (if you are already a subscriber) in reply to this email. Do you believe college sports are worth the cost? If you are or once were a college athlete, how does that experience shape your perspective? If you were a college leader, how might you respond to seeing a million-dollar deficit from athletics in your budget report every year?
So many good things to unpack here. I'm a former sportswriter, covered three Division I programs. One -- Washington State -- is currently $100 million in athletic debt. I'm not lying about that number. The former A.D. spent like a drunken sailor ($80M football facility when half that would've been fine), put the school in debt and fled to the University of Nebraska (sorry, Josh). Today, they still play the games at WSU, pay the coaches obscene amounts of money, and continue to build up debt, while the university cuts things like theater.
The other schools I covered had similar issues, except Oregon which was saved by a billionaire booster. Otherwise they'd be in the same boat.
I'm a sports geek, love college sports, ran cross country in college, all that. I'm changing my tune on all this with the insane money being tossed around, mostly for facilities and college salaries. It's rather obvious that Alabama will pay all their football players millions, while other schools that can't do it think they have to keep up with the Crimson Tide.
If my college offered a cross country club instead of intercollegiate team, I would've joined. We could've coached ourselves or found someone better than the lazy coaches I had. We could find local races, drive ourselves there. I would've been good with all of that. Perhaps the model that needs to be put in place, from major college to small college.
I remember sitting in the knot-hole section at Memorial Stadium when I was in grade school, and back then I believe those end zone tickets cost about a buck. It was thrilling. And when I was fifteen, I remember sitting with my friend whose dad had 50 Yard Line seats, watch Nebraska beat Army. Wow! That was a big deal in 1960, and years later when I was a senior at Nebraska I managed to score some seats high and away, still in the end zone, and it was still thrilling. And even today, when I happen to catch the Huskers on TV, I can still feel a bit of an adrenaline rush, though admittedly the feeling has lessened in the last years.
But why has any feeling presisted at all? Why do I have a physiological and emotional reaction to a game I never really played by a team I don't even know? Josh, you got me thinking about the complex interplay between sports, Big Time Sports, and the academic institutions that seem to house them. The money involved in Big Time Sports is, as many of the commentors here explain so clearly--insane, both staggering and irrational. We need sport to recruit students but most sports programs loose money.
So why do "we" keep on spending the kind of money that might finance several endowed chairs in the humanities on a scoreboard? I guess there are more or less "rational" reasons in Alabama where football can save a school, but mostly the irrational spending has gone beyond entertainment to something else, but what? A kind of religion (but more important), as some have suggested. Or perhaps it is one of those rituals that brings people together and gives us a sense of place and security as I heard a Greek anthropologist say on NPR today.
I get the way that sport is inflected with money and the conflicted feelings that everyone seems to have about sport and academic institutions or even academics. But it's hard to fight that spine-tingling sensation at the kick-off, the adrenaline rush when you see the football in flight. I even bought a Vikings shirt this year.