Dr. David Ridpath, professor in Ohio's revered Sports Administration program is siding with Dr. Richard Vedder and Faculty Senate in the bash on ICA's spending.  Funny how Dr. Ridpath had no problems taking a ridiculous "consulting fee" from ICA a couple of years ago.  Guy is a lightning rod where ever he is!

http://www.athensnews.com/ohio/article-32491-athletics-re...

Did you know the guy was banned by Athens Sandlot for his conduct towards a coach?  And he started his tirade with "do you know who I am?".  At this time he was teaching Ethics in Sport!

That doesn't mean he isn't right.  We are throwing millions of dollars per year at an athletics department that generates pennies on the dollar in terms of actual returns on that investment.  The current level of athletics spending is simply unsustainable over the long-term without a significant increase in booster donations.  But it's not just us, it's the same at 95% of non-BCS schools.  The current system is horribly broken nationwide, and desperately needs to be fixed.

I realize it isn't a popular viewpoint here, and that most will just choose to shoot the messenger.  But for all the talk around here of bringing corporate sector sensibilities to the university, the first place any experienced CEO would look to cut the budget is athletics.  It is a financial black hole at a school the level of OU. 

The median household income in Southeast Ohio is $27K a year... The average salary for a full professor at Ohio University is $100k... Forgive me if I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for a group of people making 4 times as much as the community around them....  Nevermind that $100K is more than all but 3 employees in the entire Athletic Department...  

Ridpath says that the coaches are making too much?  Which coaches?  Groce and Solich are the only ones making more than the average professor....

By all means let's pay our faculty more... a 25% increase over the last 8 years surely isn't good enough for a group of people who have the ultimate job security and can't be fired...



http://www.ohio.edu/instres/factbook/facsal_aaup.html

Coaches and professors should make what the market will bear, full stop. If a professor wants to make more money, than they need to have a skill-set that will allow them to be paid more. Same as the coaches.

I said Full professor... i meant to say it in the second statement but didn't...

You're really going to give me crap for rounding $99,249 up to $100k?

As far as the education aspect... Head Coaches are educators as well... to say they aren't teaching the kids who are playing for them is ridiculous.  Learning isn't confined to a test tube in Clippinger or a spreadsheet in Copeland...

A CEO would focus first on where the dollars are going and not the cents. Over time, they get to the cents as well. Most all CEO's will becnhmark their areas of spend vs. the competitors. The Ohio CEO would find they were in line in that regard.

Look, I'm all in favor of holding people's feet to the fire on Athletics spending. If Ohio has a budget shortfall in athletics, maybe it needs to add another money game in football. If alumni think it's valuable, they should be pay for it by starting a $20M endowment that could offset 5% (and hopefully grow it to more) of annual operating budget. Former student-athletes should be given the opportunity to secure the long-term viability of the sports they participated in (the roughly 800 living former footballers should be able to endow a $400K to $500K scholarship each year. It's a long build but over the course of time you will have funded the delta between the FCS/FBS argument). State lawmakers should be lobbied so that the Ohio MAC schools can benefit from a de facto tax in the same way Ohio St. benefits from the Big 10 network tax. Communities should invest more in these types of activities which in turn tey can benefit from.

At the end of the day, I look at people's incentives. The faculty senate is looking to create a shining object to distract people from taking a closer look at them. Or, maybe they feel they'll get some of the dollars if they can eliminate athletics (and then the arts and whatever other services they can go after). Vedder, to his credit I guess, has been much of university spending (construction, athletics and otherwise). He's found a niche that gets him in the press a lot which allows him to make more money through books and studies.   

I disagree. I think university Boards and Presidents realize there is a value and are comfortable where that fits in their budget. Is it hard to quantify? You bet. No different that than the value of a new Baker Center vs. the old Baker Center. Or which and how many majors to offer. Or how much money you want to spend maintainng campus grounds.

I guess it depends on what you view as the competition.  If by the competition you mean MAC schools, then yes our spend is probably roughly in line.  But if you look at our competition as Division I schools generally, or even just all non-BCS FBS conferences, then we are out of line, because a significantly higher percentage of our athletics budget is subsidized by the university than most other Division I schools. 

In any event, the best CEOs don't just blindly follow their competitors, but instead try to find inefficiencies that they can exploit.  If the only defense of our current athletics spending model that we can muster is that everyone else is doing the same thing, then that isn't a very good rationale for continuing down the current path. 

We should be documenting the actual, tangible benefits that athletics provides to the rest of the university.  For instance, let's survey incoming freshmen to determine what percentage of them viewed our athletics department as a factor in their decision to enroll.  Or at a more micro level, how many of them watched last year's Pizza Bowl.  Similarly, a survey of alumni could be conducted to determine how many of them follow OU sports after graduation, and how important they believe it is to continue those programs.  Then we could start to have a rational discussion about the value that athletics provides to the university.



I agree here as well.  Why aren't we taking these steps?  The cynic in me suspects its because we know that alumni support isn't anywhere at the level it needs to be in order to accomplish what you propose, but perhaps it is a failure of leadership.  In any case, if we could do something like this, it would provide a starting point for defending the athletics department.  That doesn't mean that it'll shut up all of the faculty, but then at least you'd have some reasonable defenses for the spending.  Right now the only defense we can offer is that everyone else is doing it, which isn't exactly true for the reasons discussed above, and in any event largely irrelevant for determining the rationality of the present course.

I think the benefits are more numerous than that which you've tried to limit them. It is hard to figure what part of your branding spend can tip the scales in your favor or give you mindshare. Is there are a larger student group on campus than the O Zone? But if you're going to go down the path of ROI, then ROI needs to be proved on everything. What's the ROI on each major that's offered? What's the ROI on each professor? On each administrator? Of building a new Baker Center vs. keeping the old one? If those things are done, I'll feel really good about how Athletics spending fares. Especially when a large chunk of that spending (scholarships) is on the university itself. Bottom line is: if Athletics budgets make it through this so-called "Great Recession" then I think the outlook is solid for the future. But as I said earlier, I'm all for looking to for ways to do things better and making folks put more money where their mouth is.   

Admittedly the potential benefits are broader than what I outlined as a potential survey, but that was just off the top of my head.  And I admit that in some cases they may be hard to fully capture, quantatively.  But we aren't even trying.  And that is a root cause of some of the current backlash on campus.  Professors are, by and large, rational folks.  If you claim that something is beneficial, they expect to see some proof that what you claim is true. 

From an institutional perspective, I wouldn't be too concerned with the size of the OZone versus other student groups on campus.  Those students are, for the most part, going to remain students with or without the OZone.  Rather, I would be interested in seeing what percentage of students overall attend sporting events, and with what frequency, when deciding whether to continue to subsidize athletics disproportionately with student fees.  I'd also be interested in seeing how many incoming freshmen were aware of our Pizza Bowl game, and for how many it factored in any way in their decision to attend Ohio University, so that I can make a more informed decision this winter about whether the benefits of a Humanitarian Bowl or Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl appearance outweigh the significant costs.



I don't entirely agree.  I think that ROI is more relevant to tangential university functions (like athletics) than it is to core university functions like academics.  There are some things that well rounded universities should support even if they don't make a profit off of them.  Athletics is one of those, in my mind, but not necessarily at the Division I level.  Nevertheless, if we elect to cut some majors and programs, that is effectively what we'd be doing, cutting the ones that offer the lowest ROI? 

In this budget climate, everything should be up for debate.  The problem is that the administration has pretty much taken athletics off the table, without any justification. 

The school is going to be featured on National Television six hours over the next four weeks. In addition the school name scrolls across the bottom of the screen nationally on ABC, NBC/ND, CBS/ClarkK and all the sports channels. I am not sure what this is worth, but I have noticed a lot more people know the difference between Ohio University and Ohio State since coach Solich has arrived in town.

As a rural non commuter University, Ohio better do all the advertising it can to compete with all the less expensive big city commuter schools that seem to be growing at record pace. The elder professor probably does not care since they are likely to get paid with or without students to teach. The younger ones should be concerned.

Sometimes I wonder why Colleges have sports programs at all. I think it all goes back to a day when it was believed that in order to have a sound mind, it was good to have a sound body, and physical education of some form or other was the order of the day for everyone. Then they needed someone to compete against, and it slowly evolved into what we have today. It is worth noting that for-profit Universities never have sports programs of any kind. Perhaps the human species has evolved to the point that video games and watching professional sports provides all the exercise we really need, and we can do away with the quaint notion that physical exercise is good for us?

I know that my time in College would have been vastly different without athletics, whether we are talking about participating, or as a fan. Thus, it isn't all bad. The problem doesn't have an easy solution, though. It isn't just FBS schools that have financial issues; FCS schools have every bit as many budget issues, and the same funding plan generally of assessing quarterly student fees to pay for it.