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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

That's not his point though. His point is that for every bit of handwringing of how ghastly some people's comments on sports are, there's the reality that the football coach is the highest (in the millions of dollars range) paid position at almost every university in the US, how the sporting department despite those figures manages to be a net budgetry drain on almost every school which has one, and the reality that college-level sports is hugely abusive and exploitative to the players which actually play it.

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>how the sporting department despite those figures manages to be a net budgetry drain on almost every school which has one

And so are music departments.

Which I think is part of the point here. I firmly believe that playing right tackle can teach you just as much as playing the oboe, yet intellectuals tend to look down on former and praise the latter. Organized sports are not only a hobby and social gathering, but they can also serve as part of a greater learning and education experience. There is a reason why a few of the Ivy League schools rank near the top of all universities when it comes to the number of varsity athletes.

>that college-level sports is hugely abusive and exploitative to the players which actually play it.

You need to be specific here. Big revenue college sports (basically only Div I basketball and Div I-A football) are definitely exploitative, but most college athletes participate in sports that generate little revenue and it would be hard to argue they are being exploited.

Music departments are budget drains since when? The arts and humanities are actually rather cheap, they need nothing more than buildings, staff and a library. Science and engineering are the real whoppers, and as a rule cross-subsidized by A&H. Tuition per credit hour is the same, after all. The dean of the School of Arts & Sciences at a certain state school is on record saying that for the price of a chemistry professor she can pay a whole department of English.

That isn't the point. The point is that the mission of universities is academic pursuits, not athletics. If anyone wants to practice sports, power to him, but let him join the sports club, or let him start an inofficial intramurine league.

The wider point is that in America you can't earn much social capital by being knowledgeable about any academic subject, you have to be wealthy instead. That's a problem, and probably also explains many things about American society. Universities finally getting rid of organized sports might perhaps be able to change that.

Music departments tend to be expensive in terms of faculty, sine most of their time is spent in private lessons. If an oboe studio has 10 students, that's essentially 10 hours a week in lessons alone. In that same 10 hours, an English professor might teach 60 students (if you figure 15 students/class with 2 hours MWF and a different 30 students Tue./Thu.). Those are numbers for a small school; at larger universities an English professor might lecture to 300 students a week in 10 hours, but that oboe professor is still seeing just 10 students.

Huh? Are you talking about college? I thought the OP was talking about high school. We never had any private lessons. "Band" class was... 35+ kids in one room at a time, all playing at the same time. Band was almost always the largest single class I had, relative only to gym class. Sometimes gym was larger (40-50 at a time), but I think I had a year with more people in band class than in my pahys-ed class.

Like you say, a distinction has to be made between big and small schools. I did my undergrad at a college where the starting quarterback was a physics major. There were no athletic scholarships.

Where I went to grad school, that would have been unthinkable. There was a special major that most of the football and mens basketball players chose, one of the departments of "studies."

There's no university where the oboist in the orchestra has to be given a fake education. Indeed, most music majors these days wisely pick up a second major.

> >how the sporting department despite those figures manages to be a net budgetry drain on almost every school which has one > And so are music departments.

If the band directors made millions of dollars, you would have a good point.

If band directors brought in millions in revenue and PR value to a school, then YOU would have a point. Nobody would have ever heard of Gonzaga university if it weren't for basketball. At the schools with million dollar coaches, they bring in millions in revenue in both tickets, licensing as well as intangible PR value. I am not defending or disparaging college sports, I am making the point that a school's band program isn't generally adding revenue. It rarely attracts big donors. While Div I sports might have an operating loss (maybe,) the net income to a school, through donations, PR value, etc far exceeds the cost. How many kids want to go to Florida State that don't live in Florida? By attracting more national applicants, a school can charge out of state tuition that directly benefits their bottom line. There are many benefits to a school that aren't measured with the myopic view of "athletic income - athletic cost = profit of the program."

If the donations go to the athletic programs, then it doesn't matter. There are also numerous hidden costs associated with athletic programs, like law enforcement and extra tutoring for athletes. On top of that, most schools require ALL students (even those who don't attend sports games) to pay a fee, which acts as an additional subsidy. Even further, many public universities use part of the money they receive from their respective states to fund athletic programs.

The band students pay tuition to be there. If the football players paid tuition to be on the team and the sports teams were subsidized at the same rate as the band program, I wouldn't care.

There are a handful (maybe 20?) of schools that probably make an overall profit from their sports teams, but the rest of the thousands of colleges and universities in the US operate their sports programs at a loss. Those are really the schools I'm talking about.

> there's the reality that the football coach is the highest (in the millions of dollars range) paid position at almost every university in the US

Not only that, coaches are the highest paid public employees in most states [0].

[0] http://deadspin.com/infographic-is-your-states-highest-paid-...

I can't speak for every school, but I will share my own insight on a big football university

I attended a state school where the "highest paid public employee" was a football coach. I was lucky enough to marry a then student president of the professional students (Med, Vet, Opt, Dentist, Pharmacy, Law) and as part of her duties she sat on the athletic counsel. Our tuition did not go to the coaches at all, the athletic dept was entirely self funded and donated the excess to the school itself. They helped fund a library renovation while we were there, among other student oriented needs.

Also, because of the success of the football team they are able to fund (again without student money) all the other sports "no one cares about" eg men's badminton or women's olympic weight lifting or something... The majority of THOSE student-athletes truly are students then athletes.

Take away the good football and the other things become harder or impossible to achieve. I'm not saying sports should be considered a loss over academics, but some people enjoy both and are not going to the NFL

In contrast, at my university the football team had two 1-11 seasons in a row, and the head coach was finally fired after losing the first four games of the next season. It took so long because the school was wary of the $1.4 million cost of letting him go early. (He wound up getting paid for the entire third season, and $150,000 each for the next two years.)

Somehow I doubt UNM’s football team is able to cover the cost of the athletics department. The coach in question was Mike Locksley.

Sports is a huge financial drain on the school? Do you have any data? What I heard was that college football tends to pay for all of the other sports at a school. If anything sports creates a lot of opportunities for students that otherwise could be done due to budgets.

> What I heard was that college football tends to pay for all of the other sports at a school.

Yeah, at the most successful football schools. That's a minority among schools that have football programs. [1] [2]

>If anything sports creates a lot of opportunities for students that otherwise could be done due to budgets.

No, sports diverts scholarship funds from scholars to athletes, and the athletes rarely take full advantage of the academics in college, going for easy classes and easy majors. It actually destroys a lot of opportunities, particularly at schools that are losing money on their sports programs.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/sportsmoney/2011/05/05/does-foot...

[2] http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Ar...

>Yeah, at the most successful football schools.

And it's the successful (at pulliung NCAA TV money) football schools that have coaches with million dollar contracts.

It's a nice bait and switch you constructed. A "trick play" if you will.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--xeKPpMFq...

Feel free to search that image from other sources too.

And the data backing it.

And yes, this is not the same as it being paid for by academics...but then you have to deal with the fact that most top-tier sports departments also fail to break even, and it's extremely murky if they contribute anything back to academics at all - whereas it's pretty visible that they are allocated money out of the academic takings. [http://www.ethosreview.org/intellectual-spaces/is-college-fo...]

EDIT: All of which again, would probably be worth turning a blind eye to if it were a good thing for the players...except it isn't. Because they don't get paid.

I didn't say anything about coaches with million dollar contracts. I was responding only to the claim that football pays for the rest of the sports, which, other than men's basketball, are pretty much universally unprofitable.

If only a few schools' football programs fund the other sports, and all schools have a lot of sports, it only follows that most schools are losing money on sports, no matter how much money they pay their coaches.

That said, many unsuccessful football programs still have coaches with multimillion dollar contracts, so you're still wrong.

>It's a nice bait and switch you constructed. A "trick play" if you will.

This added nothing to the discussion and wasn't even a fair accusation, since I wasn't arguing anything like what you suggested I was. If I were being uncharitable, I would accuse you of intentionally misunderstanding my argument for the chance to be snide.

Where do those scholarship dollars come from? It must be all te donations the sociology department attracts.

Scholarship money comes from a lot of places, but usually from wealthy alumni.

It definitely doesn't come from sports at most American universities.

There's something for the argument that sports attracts students who will become wealthy alumni and donate after graduation, but AFAIK, there's no data proving it, and some that contradicts that notion.

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