Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Gregg Easterbrook has a good piece on college sports this week

It begins:

Charlie Weis and Bobby Bowden had to go -- Notre Dame and Florida State weren't winning every game! Get rid of the bums! All we heard from sports commentators, and from alums and boosters, was get rid of the bums, we gotta win, win, win. Sorry to interject, but why? Why does Notre Dame or Florida State or any university need to win every game? Is it now official that big colleges care more about sports than education?

If an NFL team, which is strictly a commercial enterprise in the business of providing entertainment, doesn't win, get rid of the bums. But a university exists to educate; winning football games is a secondary concern. Don't get me wrong. I attend way too many college football games, and I always like it when the school I'm rooting for wins. But I am not so misguided as to think that a college's winning games means more than a college's educating students, including athletes. Why is this distinction practically absent from sports commentary?....


I was harsh with him last week, so when I think his work is good...

12 comments:

SuperUmfan said...

THIS IS PLAGIARISM!!! You do not give a link to where you got this article

Richard Green said...

Well, Superumfan, I do link and and a block quote and refer to his name in the title of the post. What else would you have me do?

Anonymous said...

The issue is fund raising. The biggest reason donors donate is because they have pride in the school.

While academics is one reason donors have pride in the school, athletics is another important source of school pride.

One of the problems schools trying to push there way up the rankings have is raising money. Donors are often more reluctant to give money to weaker programs because there is less prestige involved in the gift. But fund raising is often the key to turning around a weak program.

Athletics is one way of addressing that issue.

In Los Angeles, USC, Pepperdine, and Occidental are all private schools trying to raise money from a lot of the same individuals in the region.

Athletic success at USC was one of the reasons that intially made USC more nationally prominent than Pepperdine or Occidental.

If you are going to give money, your friends and relatives on the east coast are going to be more impressed by giving it to the school they recognized.

Additionally USC could offer tickets and fund raisers with access to members of successful athletic programs. That is another way of broadening your donor base.

Donors are nurtured. Once they give a little, they are encouraged to give a lot more.

If you look at the schools on the West Coast, athletic and academic excellence are used to re-enforce each other. Stanford, UCLA, USC and Berkeley all are vigorously competing at the highest levels in both academics and athletics.

It not just Notre Dame, its Duke, Georgetown, Michigan, Texas, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, in addition to USC that have all tried to pursue excellence in both athletics and academics.

After JFK spoke at Berkeley in 1962, there were some on the campus that took JFK's comments as a critique of the strong athletics and academics. But the fund raising strength of Stanford and UCLA and the fund raising difficulties at UCSC and UCSD changed minds. Today Berkeley is actively trying to compete at the highest levels in athletics. Like USC the highest paid person at Berkeley is the football coach.

Don Coffin said...

As James Thurber (or maybe someone else) once quoted the president of Ohio State University (or, again, maybe someone else) as saying (more or less), "We need a university that the football team can be proud of."

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credit card said...

Talent is a natural thing and i don't think it has to do any thing with universities .

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