Hazards, benefits of college sports programs

‘Big-Time Sports in American Universities’: weighing why universities embrace and encourage major sports programs

May 21, 2011

Duke University professor Charles T. Clotfelter’s book “Big-Time Sports in American Universities” is a delightful guide to and analysis of the intersection between America’s major universities and their big-time sports programs.

For the average reader, this book may seem unlikely to entice. The title is functional (but dull); the author is an economist (oh, dear Lord); the publisher is a scholarly press (before cracking the cover, brew lots of coffee).

But a funny thing happens on the path through all those scatter diagrams, fever charts and the occasional reference to contingent valuation or marginal revenue product. Charles Clotfelter, a Duke University professor, proves to be a delightful guide on a quest to answer two questions: Why do so many universities embrace big-time sports? And what are the consequences? Continue reading “Ken Armstrong, The Seattle Times”

Calculating the Score

April 23, 2011

Pity the poor presidents of colleges with major athletic programs. Football coaches are not just better known than the administrators, the coaches also tend to make a lot more money. And professors lag even further behind. In 1986, the presidents at 44 public universities with teams in the five most established athletic conferences actually made, on average, a little more than their coaches: $294,000 for the presidents, $273,000 for the coaches; full professors earned about $107,000. By 2010, the professors’ income, adjusted for inflation, had climbed 32%. University presidents’ pay had gone up 90%. The football coaches’ pay jumped to more than $2 million—it had “increased by an astounding seven and a half times,” Charles T. Clotfelter writes in “Big-Time Sports in American Universities.” Mr. Clotfelter cites coaches’ contracts packed with incentives: Nick Saban’s 2010 agreement with the University of Alabama, for instance, included bonuses of $125,000 for winning the Southeastern Conference championship and $200,000 for taking the Crimson Tide to a BCS bowl game. The book offers plenty of other eye-opening statistics but is perhaps most surprising in its even-handed approach to the subject of major college athletics. Continue reading “Fred Barnes, The Wall Street Journal”

If I ever wanted to educate a person who knew nothing at all about big-time sports in American universities (and there are plenty of them out there, namely 6.86 billion non-Americans on the globe, and maybe a stray Martian or two), I would start them off with Charles Clotfelter’s book, Big-Time Sports in American Universities.

And why? Well, the book provides an impressively comprehensive narrative of the history of big-time college athletics, the good and bad associated with it, insights into reform efforts and analyses of various aspects of the ever-rising commercialism associated with big-time college sports.

Continue reading “Nick Infante, College Athletic Clips”