We Americans love our college football. When you hear the words “Alabama” or “Texas” many people automatically think about crystal footballs, bowl games, and “bragging rights.” But those rights don’t come cheap. Americans also love sports analogies for just about everything. In this case our wrecked American economy can be compared to how college football is wrecking college.
1) The executive class keeps taking more and more of the pie and the working class gets left behind.
The two coaches pictured above are both great football coaches. They each take home around or more than five million dollars a year. In Mack Brown’s case his salary represents 47 percent of the pay for all the head coaches at the University of Texas. In Nick Saban’s case his 5.62 million?annual salary was called “modest” by Forbes magazine. ?College football players on the other hand are not paid when their likeness is used to sell jersey’s, cups, mugs, t-shirts, etc. They get nothing.
Consider that the graduation rate of college football players is anywhere from 68 to 57 percent (depending upon which set of generous numbers you use) and that black football players who go to college have around a fifty percent chance of not getting a degree. ?Sounds just like America where, as of 2011, one in two (50 percent) of Americans are poor. Considering that things have gotten worse since 2011 and not better it is safe to assume the number is actually WORSE than that now. Think on that. We are living in a country where the MAJORITY of our citizens are low-wage, poor, or living at or near poverty.
2) Winning — at all costs — is all that matters.?
We were all told as children, “It’s not whether you win or lose it’s how you play the game.” Well that isn’t true in college football. A coach that is hailed as a genius one season can be fired the next for not winning. Lane Kiffin from USC is simply the latest in a string of college football coaches that got fired for having losing seasons. And, when making a couple of million or two (or more) per year perhaps that seems fair. But what if coaching was also about making sure the athletes you brought into the program really got an education? What if coaching was about teaching teamwork and problem solving? ?All those things we were lied to and told “organized sports” were about? ?To paraphrase the Bible, “What does it profit a college to win a bowl game if it loses its own soul?” If it really is all about the money then why even have it associated with colleges?
3) Unprofitable business models are propped up by stealing from taxpayers, employees, or customers.?
If it wasn’t for government subsidies, states letting Walmart keep a portion of the sales taxes they collect, and bad trade deals Walmart wouldn’t be profitable. Which means their business model doesn’t work. The company is sustained by stealing the labor of its workers, the taxes from the states they have stores in, and by using the lax, non-existent standards of other countries to manufacture their goods. This pretty much describes college football in a way.
There is an “arms race” of stadiums, sky boxes, VIP areas, “facilities” to train athletes (many of whom won’t graduate or who will go pro), and ever-higher salaries and perks for “winners.” ?Let’s go back to the University of Alabama, the great Crimson Tide, Forbes magazine did a story on how Nick Saban and a winning football team have helped the school:
According to the school, less than a third of the 2007 freshman class hailed from out of state. By the fall of 2012, more than half (52%) of the freshman class did. Various data from?US News?and the?New York Times?shows that the school’s out-of-state tuition cost ? nearly three times higher than the rate for in-state students ? rose from $18,000 to $22,950 a year during that period. ?And this:?Kick in the additional $8.5 million in in-state tuition, which rose to $9,200 a year from $6,400 over the same period, and overall tuition revenue rose to $104 million from $46 million for the respective 2012 and 2007 freshman classes. And to boot, the school’s most recent capital campaign (i.e. donations from alumni and others) raised $600 million for scholarships and facilities, the most ever. ? ?
Now this seems like the football program has completely changed the University of Alabama. And it has. The University now accepts MORE out of state students, who pay more in tuition, than it does from within Alabama. So this “state school” no longer represents the population of Alabama. ?For those lucky few Alabamians who do get accepted to “the University” they have seen their tuition go UP almost five thousand dollars!
So where does all the money that this wildly successful football program make go? Where does the money from licensing “official” gear go? And notice at the end how they lump in BOTH scholarships and facilities donations without saying what type of facilities? So from these three points it is fairly easy to see how the broken college football system reflects our own larger broken system.
The college president of Washington State University makes about $750,000 a year. The football coach at WSU makes 2.2 million dollars a year. Most people realize this makes no sense. And remember, 90 percent of major athletic departments LOSE money. ?So why spend so much money to lose money?
Additionally, why don’t the schools themselves use the power they have to insist that their uniforms, shoes, official licensed merchandise, etc…be made in the USA? This one act would create thousands of jobs. Jobs that would need managers, executives, accountants, MBA’s, and engineers. In short, their graduates. By not insisting on this the universities are stealing opportunities from their own alumni.
This is exactly the problem with the rest of our economy. No one wants to pay workers a living wage because there might be one cent of profit that doesn’t get stolen and/or squandered by some petulant billionaire. ?The lack of American made college football merchandise is the most damning and telling fact about the college football industry. And its fans. And holds a mirror up to the rest of the country.
Everything wrong with us (and U.S.) CAN be explained by what’s wrong with college football.
