Ohio’s athletic spending has been a divisive issue around Athens this year, even while the football and men’s basketball teams were putting together historically good seasons for the Green and White.
The recession has hit universities harder than most and Ohio is no exception. In such tough economic times, the athletic department has become a sort of “lightning rod” for the criticism of overspending, according to Joe McLaughlin, the president of Faculty Senate.
“Athletics is highly visible,” he said. “It stands as a [representative] for everything that isn’t essential.”
Budget cuts have taken a toll all around campus, including, contrary to popular perception, within the athletics department. In 2007, four sports—lacrosse, swimming and diving and indoor and outdoor track and field—were dropped to cut costs.
“Ohio Athletics has endured a cut of $1.25 million over the past two years, which is among the highest reductions of any Mid-American Conference institution,” Jason Corriher, Ohio Athletics Media Relations Director, said. “The department has also been forced to eliminate 17 full or part-time positions during this time period.”
An editorial from the Post in 2005 noted that Ohio Athletics at that time—prior to recent cuts—was ranked 104th of 117 Division 1-A teams in terms of athletics spending. The school was spending 2.7 percent of its budget on sports, compared to a 4.9 percent average nationally.
Overspending in an attempt to become an elite sports school is not unique to Athens, Ohio. Only five schools out of the 119 that play football in the Bowl Subdivision of Division 1 managed to make a profit from their programs. U. Cincinnati, which just had the finest football season in school history, recently announced a $24 million debt.
Part of the reason that Ohio’s department has received such recent backlash is the perception for some that it is becoming more important than academics.
“We need to make some hard decisions about what the institution’s top priorities are. I think that there are an awful lot of faculty, and some students and certainly staff members that don’t like how those priorities are playing out in terms of budget decisions,” McLaughlin said.
“The University comes first, but we’ve lost that, we’ve lost sight of that. [Athletics] doesn’t define who we are, and we shouldn’t use it to justify increased spending,” David Ridpath, a professor in the Department of Sports Administration said.
So where does Ohio go from here? As McLaughlin said, the University needs to make some hard decisions. It is much easier to talk about cutting the budget for sports than doing so at the cost of quality, especially because those who love the Bobcats are as adamant about funding athletics as those who are apathetic towards sports are about cutting back.
“There is a clear cause and effect relationship with respect to investment and performance when it comes to intercollegiate athletics,” Corriher said about the effect that added cuts would have on performance. He also touched on the benefits that having good sports teams has on a school, using the basketball team’s headline-making-upset of Georgetown in the NCAA Tournament as an example.
“The win gave us significant national exposure and helped to build the brand of Ohio Athletics. A win of that magnitude helps the university in the areas of enrollment, alumni relations and fosters a sense of pride in our community. Another positive this year is that we had eight nationally-televised games in football and men’s basketball combined. That type of exposure only serves to benefit the university,” he said.
The “OZone,” Ohio’s student supporters, has long been regarded as the premier section of its kind within the Mid-American Conference. The size of the section may not be an impressive percentage of the overall school, but the hundreds and sometimes thousands of students who go to games up shows that those enrolled are not completely apathetic towards the Bobcats, and that some care quite a lot about their success.
Ridpath warned, however, the high amount of debt that comes with athletics—both at Ohio and nationally—cannot continue. He said that athletics is an easy target because it is easy to see the costs and hard to see the benefits because they’re intangible. When the visible costs reach an unreasonable level, the overall system needs to change.
In a recent USA Today article analyzing the high subsidies that athletic departments receive from its students, Carole Browne, a professor at Wake Forest who co-chairs the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics–a national faculty group that advocates for athletics reform–spoke out against the high cost of the big time.
“It’s appalling in the big picture and representative of what is going on in athletics with coaches’ salaries and facilities. It’s part of a bigger problem,” she said.
“I do doubt that any University would [significantly cut costs] on their own, which is a shame. It needs to be done by a group of schools, perhaps at the conference level,” Ridpath said. ”A conference like the MAC would make sense for something like that.”
Ridpath added that there are plenty of costs that could be cut, especially if it is agreed upon by a group of schools or the nation collectively.
“There are several ways to cut costs…the facilities arms race is probably the biggest one. People think, we’ve got to build a press box that is used only five times a year. People say we need to build an indoor practice facility. Why? Football is supposed to be played outdoors. There is a lot of fat in intercollegiate athletic budgets,” he said.
The path to slimmer athletic budgets is not an easy one. There is a lot of attraction in having an elite sports school, especially at a place like Ohio. The NCAA Tournament victory might eliminate the constant Ohio State confusion out of state and cause more students to be proud in their school.
These intangible benefits go a long way in forming the identity of a school, but the cost is becoming too high. A national change is necessary, but will it come in time?