Dr. John Cheslock
Today, as the collegiate basketball season heats up and some begin to ponder next fall’s football lineups, the conference affiliation scramble continues. Major institutions continue on the hunt for new alliances they hope will generate even more money to support their increasingly expensive programs. In the process, the distance between the haves and have nots gets wider and wider.
“A major determinate of your financial situation is your conference,” says Dr. John Cheslock, co-author of The Unsustainable Nature of the Intercollegiate Athletic System, one of the studies issued last fall, and director of Penn State’s Center for the Study of Higher Education.
Athletic conferences with a strong roster of high-profile member colleges generate millions of dollars in game telecast revenue, Cheslock says, explaining the conferences distribute the telecast revenue to member schools, and distribution differs by conference. “The way to make sure you’re in a good financial condition is to make sure you’re in a good conference,” says Cheslock. “Everyone’s trying to get into the right conference.”
Rutgers University, for example, had been subsidizing its athletic programs by about $1,000 per student, Cheslock says. The university is hoping that its jump to the Big 10 conference from the Big East will bring it more money, and in the process, ease its need to divert more and more of its money to athletics from other programs, he says. The same is true for the University of Maryland, which made a similar move, jumping to the Big 10 from the ACC, primarily to secure the financial future of its intercollegiate sports program. It’s an unsustainable pattern, he warns.
“Congress is going to have to get involved, just like we’ve seen in other industries,” says University of Memphis professor Dr. Michael Hutchinson, co-author of a study, titled De-escalation of Commitment among Division I Athletic Departments. He says some outside force needs to address the intercollegiate sports industry and put some new rules in its operating procedures. If not, he says, “We’re going to continue to see the divide between the haves and have nots.
“Amid all the economic downturn, there are still institutions escalating their commitments [to intercollegiate athletic programs],” says Hutchinson. “I don’t know why. With all the financial information and all the complaints from students about increasing fees and tuition, I don’t see the return on investment [in intercollegiate athletic programs] for the overall student body,” he says, emphasizing that his study focused purely on the economics of intercollegiate athletics. He says even when he and his co-researcher found cases of athletic programs generating more revenue for schools, the money went into the athletic programs. “It’s the same mentality of trying to keep up with the Joneses.”
