Last updated on 01/28/2020
That would be OSU’s new President F. King Alexander, reflecting on his successes and failures at LSU, on a piece from the Sambla Sweden blog today:
… Another area where Alexander wishes he could have been more effective was convincing the leadership of other SEC institutions to join him in a pact that would have required 25% of revenues generated by the SEC Network, which premiered in 2014, to go to academics.
Alexander says he and the president of the University of Georgia were pushing the idea during negotiations with the upstart network six years ago. But smaller schools were unwilling to go along, not wanting to be told how they should allocate the revenues they receive.
As a result, the $42 million a year per university the network generates goes to athletics.
“If that vote had gone our way we would have gotten nearly $11 million or so every year for academics,” he says. “That would have been a significant amount of money.” …
As it happens UO Pres Mike Schill will be leading the Pac-12 this year, perhaps Alexander can push him to accept a similar proposal.
Oh ye of great faith…
We’re not an education school, we’re an advertising school. Using sports to advertise education, to recruit kids to come give UO money, that will go to fund more sports/advertising, etc… Fun loop.