A Notable Club at the University of Oregon

Is that why college tuition is so high? To pay for college football?

You need to be more careful with that statement, as people interpret it that “football teams lose money” which is demonstrably false. Almost every SEC team’s FOOTBALL team runs a net profit. Most athletic programs run a deficit. The football team subsidizes the rest of the athletic program, in particular women’s sports which don’t have the revenue streams.

Auburn is a member of the SEC, and their football team nets them almost $25m a year. That money is nearly all spent on all the other sports which do not net any money and the entire athletics program nets about -$140k

Oregon isn’t and their football team nets $8m and their athletic program nets -$130k.

If you want to talk about business decisions, it’d make sense to cut the smaller sports. If you want to talk about preserving culture with not-so-popular sports, you’d use the football team to subsidize that.

My alma mater (LSU) shows a net gain of $5m to the school coffers from the athletics department and a net profit of (almost) $28m from football alone.

The source for LSU (and links to all the others): http://www2.indystar.com/NCAA_financial_reports/expense_stat/show?school_id=12

Actually, most football programs do lose money; only the biggest players in the biggest leagues profit from football.

Also, what’s a Hostess Organization?

Kris, players don’t make any money in the NCAA. And yes, the Division I schools are the ones that have huge football programs that cost so much money. The ones that don’t make much money also don’t cost so much to run. It’s not usually football that loses the money, it’s the athletics department as a whole.

@Kris:
Ho Ho! You Ding Dong, it’s no Wonder you don’t know what a Hostess Organization is! I’d hit you with a Sno Ball if I could, but failing that, I must resort to Zingers.

… Um, whoops. Wrong Hostess Organization. *grin*

“Our university sciences dept has found a cure for cancer!”
Who cares? Your football team sucks! Losers!

As Cheryl can probably attest the first thing you do when you move to Alabama is pick which team you cheer for. Your location will have a big influence on this decision. If you are religious it is recommended you make this decision before selecting a church to attend. Cheering for the wrong team in your church is not a good idea.

@ asonge

I think by players, Kris meant whole teams or programs. Using the word players that way sounds wrong, if not confusing, but people do regularly do it.

@Tony – I know of a church that many, many years ago fired their preacher because he said something bad about The Bear. Football is very much a religion here. As evidence, there are a lot of Alabamians who will tell you the Bama team is headed up by Coach Satan (Saban).

If i’m reading this right, it says the FOOTBALL PROGRAM OPERATING budget, not the budget for the entire athletic department… and it’s like multi-millions over what the FOOTBALL REVENUE is.

Football also functions as PR/Advertising for a school, Let’s not forget that. The athletics department here at Oregon is more or less its own unit. It has it own IT, its own catering rules, and ability to sign contracts for marketing. Its self sustaining entirely, Oregon reported $59 million of revenue in its entire athletic department in 2008-09, according to financial records submitted to the NCAA. Auburn reported $58.6 million in just football revenue that year, and $87 million in total operating revenue for its athletics department.

The Athletics here in Oregon operate in its own capacity, and the donors often kick out money for other buildings, hence for example, The Knight Library here in Eugene. Its disturbing how much we value sports but there are a lot of secondary and tertiary benefits.

My job actually exists simply because of the athletics department, I’m not employed by the university but rather the bookstore, and we make our own money mostly off sports merchandise. Colleges without sucessful sports programs generally prop their bookstores and lose money on them, where as we make money and give back to the school as we’re a nonprofit.

Hemant,

I would like to make one large point and correction to your post. My husband works within the athletic department at a Big10 school. Most athletic departments at schools like Oregon and talked about in the article you linked are financially independent from their associated universities. Meaning that precisely $0 dollars from tuition or other funding that students pay into the system goes towards the athletic departments. The university has access to the athletic department’s accounts and can draw from those accounts to pay checks in the university’s name (e.g. my husband’s paycheck is issued by the university but the money is drawn from an independent athletics account that is not pooled with other university funds).

Additionally, to others talking about the money football teams draw in vs. money spent. There are usually only a handful of sports that bring in money to an athletics department (football, basketball, occasionally volleyball, hockey, wrestling). The income of these sports pay for every single space that the athletics department owns and operates. So all the gyms, all the outdoor tracks and sporting areas, etc are paid by a handful of sports. This also means that all the club teams or less popular sports that are affiliated with the school but don’t act as much of a draw for a large audience are supported on the revenue of the larger sports. Having a football team at our university means that we not only are able to be nationally recognized but that we also get to have excellent facilities for athletic recreation and fun sports like rugby, soccer, field hockey, lacrosse, etc.

Our football team draws people into a very rural town every fall who boost the sales of stores owned by the university and the larger town and provide an excellent windfall that actually makes the cost of living the rest of the year much lower for the students here. Many who donate to the athletics department also donate money to the university in general, not including the many coaches who do so out of generosity and support for the university that gives them their jobs.

Does this mean I love my football team? Eh. I hate dealing with the crowds and the fact that I can’t get around town on football weekends. Living here it can be quite irritating.

However, I feel that now that I know how the athletics department operates I do need to be fair in understanding it’s relationship and impact on the university and town that I live in.

Silent Service: It’s unlikely that the smaller schools copy the pattern “out of habit”, or all it would take is a few schools to break that mold and suddenly, there’d be evidence that dumping/slashing the football program would save a small school’s bottom line.

Rather, what’s more likely is that the colleges have not fully adapted to the realities of the internet age. In prior decades, a student heard about colleges from one of three sources:

1: Friends and family, who would recommend the schools they went to/are going to go to;
2: Guidance counselors at your school;
3: Reports on the football games.

(There’s arguably a fourth category for actively recruited students, but those are pretty much just the top tier of scholarship students; we’re looking for butts-in-seats numbers, here.)

This is likely changing–a prospective student can research a school’s academic program in their hoped-for field in minutes, and start off with a well-phrased Google search, rather than having to hear about the school first and then request the information. This change, however, is likely a bit slow to occur, and in areas where football remains popular, it is going to be a driving force for some time.

Little UO trivia, Dan Fouts was a QB at Oregon (as shown above) he was a Super Bowl Champion with the Chargers, a TV analyst for ABC and Fox, was featured in the movie the Waterboy, and he’s an atheist!