Tag Archives: athletics subsidy

9/12/2015: Andy Greif has the game preview in the Oregonian here – though not the financial details. Maybe UO still hasn’t responded to that public records request.

Last year GSU won 1 out of 12 football games, and brought in just $654,347 from ticket sales for football and basketball combined. So their athletic director and coach need the Ducks’ $900K  contract payment to make payday for their players themselves. GSU Coach Trent Miles’s salary is $510K, and after airfare for the team he should have that covered.

And Duck AD Rob Mullens is perfectly willing to pay Miles $900K for a blowout win. It doesn’t quite seem sporting, but that’s big-time college sports.

It also seems well above the going rate:

9/4/2015: Ducks pay EWU $450K for “body-bag” game, President Schill pays Ducks $375K for skybox seats

The contract between Rob Mullens and Bill Chaves is here. UO sat on the public records request for weeks, but EWU emailed it to me in a few days:

And here’s the agreement between Johnson Hall and Athletics, to divert academic money towards the “presidential skybox” at Autzen, etc. That’s right, UO students pay for the president’s football skybox. It took a petition to the Oregon DOJ to pry this document out of UO, but now it is posted on the goducks website here:

And here we’ve got athletics bitching that they haven’t got rent check yet:

But Mullens claims the Ducks get no subsidies. At least they’re arguing over the right thing. Someday the PAC-12 ADs may even start doing something to help out their universities with that new TV revenue.

Just kidding, we know they’ll spend it all on raises for themselves. Adam Jude has the story in the Seattle Times, here.

Speaking of subsidies, rumor has it that I finally raised enough stink about Rob Mullens hijacking the $5M Robin Jaqua gift. He’s returned it to the academic side, which means we save $200,000 a year on the $2.2M cost of subsidizing the Jock Box athlete-only tutoring. Baby steps, but I hope this is true. We’ll know more when the UO Senate revisits the anti-subsidy motions this fall.

No, of course I’m not talking about basketball coach Dana Altman – he’s a lost cause. I’m talking about women’s volleyball coach Jim Moore. RG columnist Austin Meek has the story here:

On paper, Moore acknowledged, the task looks daunting. According to financial documents filed with the U.S. Department of Education, Oregon’s volleyball program generated $387,000 in revenue and $1.6 million in expenses for 2013-14.

This program does give out 13 full-ride scholarships, apparently almost all to out of state-students. Let’s see, he’s losing $1.3M per year, so each scholarship costs UO $100,000. So we could eliminate volleyball and give out 50 full-ride scholarships to Oregon residents selected on the basis of academic merit or need. We’d have to drop a men’s sport too of course, because of Title IX. How about baseball? That would be another 150 scholarships, easy.

Meanwhile Altman is losing about $3M a year, or 120 merit/need scholarships. And that doesn’t count the Knight Arena bond payments.

I had to file a few public records petitions with the Oregon Department of Justice to make it happen, but Rob Mullens and the Athletic Department are now very transparent about finances – coach contracts here, NCAA docs and once secret MOU’s here:

From the Athletic Department’s July 2012 planning document, full pdf here:

That’s the closing line from LCB Prof. Dennis Howard’s Op-Ed on Duck Athletics and UO, in the RG on Sunday and online here. The RG comments are pretty interesting as well. Prof. Howard and I had a panel discussion on athletic funding at the Eugene City Club in June, there’s more on that here.

I don’t agree with all of this Op-Ed. In particular there are many more hidden subsidies, and I think efforts to use Duck football to market UO academic’s side will probably be expensive and embarrassing failures. But the conclusion sure resonates:

… We can also do a better job of using athletics as an asset in our academic fundraising efforts. The Duck Athletic Fund must be fully integrated into the UO’s academic capital campaign.

Ohio State University provides an excellent model. There, athletic and academic fundraising personnel are rewarded for working together. Attractive athletic assets such as preferred seating for football and basketball are used to reward donors who give to academics as well as to athletics.

Athletics is the UO’s gateway to giving. Historically, 70 percent of those who give more than a $1,000 a year to the academic programs first gave to athletics. Importantly, a significant number of these donors eventually commit a sizeable share of their giving to academics.

Recently this trend has declined. To harness the power of our academic and athletic programs the UO needs a unified fundraising model in which athletic and academic fundraising units work collaboratively on behalf of the entire institution.

UO President Michael Schill is the one person who can make it happen.

7/1/2015: In the RG Letters, here: 

UO athletics should share its bounty

I don’t often agree with Bill Harbaugh, but I must admit he and Dennis Howard made a very good point in their June 26 talk to the City Club of Eugene. The University of Oregon Department of Athletics should be contributing more directly to the UO general fund for academic support.

When I was UO provost and senior vice president (1994-2006), I reached an agreement in 2000 with then-Athletic Director Bill Moos that athletics would not be subsidized from the general fund and would become fully self-supporting.

Before that, the general fund subsidized athletics to the tune of more than $1 million per year.

I assume that agreement is still being followed. If it is, the UO program is one of the few among public universities that’s self-supporting, a laudable situation. Since then, UO athletics has flourished and is now in a position to give back to the university that gave it life and has supported it through many lean years, from the 1960s through the 1990s.

I believe the suggestion that 10 percent of the Athletic Department budget be returned to the general fund is reasonable, and certainly affordable for athletics. That shouldn’t be construed as a “gift” to the UO. All athletic facilities stand on land owned by the university. (Matt Knight Arena was paid for at least in part with Athletic Department funds and is technically owned by the university.)

A 10 percent fee for the use of the land, and the UO name, seems eminently reasonable to me.

JOHN MOSELEY

Moseley was Provost when the 2004 Task Force agreement was signed. As he notes, it called for an end to subsidies. From what I can tell those subsidies did end under Moseley’s tenure as provost. But millions more crept back on the books under provosts Linda Brady and Jim Bean, and Scott Coltrane did nothing to deal with them as Provost, or as Interim President.

6/26/2015: Can we make big-time Duck sports work for UO?

Diane Dietz has the story on the Eugene City Club’s Friday talk with myself and LCB professor emeritus Dennis Howard, in the RG here. Please consider posting comments there. Some ideas that came out of the panel:

… Put the fund-raising personnel the athletics department employs and those the university employs under the same managers, Howard said. Collaborate instead of compete for contributions, he said. Do joint pitches for athletic and academic gifts. “We could do it so much better,” Howard said.

Harbaugh agreed, saying, “It would be really good if we were all in this together and the athletic department was trying to help the rest of the university.”

Harbaugh suggested the university take charge of the athletic department budget centrally, with university financial officers doling out the annual budget and the university absorbing any excess — as is done now for other UO departments.

Or, go a different direction, and cut the Athletic Department loose, encourage it to raise as much as it can and take 10 percent of revenues to pay for academic scholarships.

If scholarships were tied to wins in that way, UO professors would get their pom-poms out, he said.

Thanks to the City Club and organizers Karen Wyatt and Marty Wilde for hosting this discussion. We had a good turnout and what I thought was an interesting discussion and questions. Audio should be posted on KLCC in a day or two here. From the Eugene City Club website:

The Future of Collegiate Athletics at the U of O
Downtown Athletic Club, 3rd Floor Ballroom

… Many in the community say that the fondness for Ducks teams and other world class sporting events contributes to a sense of community pride and brings people together in a unique and spirited way. Others express concerns about the exploitation of student athletes say that the resources expended on athletics come at the expense of academics and other community resources.

Considered an international authority on sports finance, Howard was head of the Marketing Department for the UO Lundquist College of Business before becoming its Dean. He has held various positions at the UO for more than 25 years, with one five-year break to head the graduate program in sport management at Ohio State University. His PhD is from Oregon State University.

Harbaugh has a Phd in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s been an economics professor at UO since 1995, and has edited the UO Matters blog since 2009. His research on the neural foundations of charitable giving has been published in Science, and featured in the New York Times. He has been on UO’s Intercollegiate Athletics Committee since 2011, and this June 3rd he was elected as the UO Senate VP and President-Elect on a platform that included a call for a new UO Task Force to fix the broken relationship between Duck athletics and UO’s academic side.

City Club members will engage the speakers in a Q&A session after the presentations.

Continue reading →

The UO administration and foundation do a much better job of hiding their jock subsidies than UC does. The story in the Cincinatti CityBeat is here:

Robin Hood in Reverse

How universities force working-class students to pay thousands of dollars in hidden fees to athletic departments awash in red ink:

This story was written and reported by an investigative reporting class at the University of Cincinnati. Reporting by Morgan Batanian, Katie Coburn, Fernanda Crescente, Taylor Jackson, Tyler Kuhnash and Camri Nelson. Research contributed by Taylor Hayden, Talis Linauts, Kayleigh Murch, Matt Nichols, Malia Pitts and Lauren Smith.

Kevin Leugers pays the University of Cincinnati to provide him with a quality education.

The second-year student majoring in marketing and philosophy had no idea officials had quietly funneled tens of millions of dollars from students to the athletic department in recent years to cover the difference between revenue and expenses.

“It seems to be a corruption of education, in all honesty,” says Leugers, a University Honors Program student and Kolodzik Business Scholar. “Athletics is being given priority over education, over the professors, over the students. I just think that’s wrong.”

… [Board of Trustees Chair Thomas Hum] says sports are “a good investment for the university as a whole” and that the board decided every dollar given to the athletic department was money well spent.

“There has been a decision that whatever that investment number is that it is a positive investment for the university,” he says. “I don’t view it as a concern.”

The investment certainly brought a high return in 2014 to some UC coaches, particularly compared to the university’s 334 student-athletes. The university provided the students with $5.99 million in scholarship aid, less than 11 percent of the $55.4 million in athletic expenditures, according to UC’s NCAA report.

That same year, UC paid a dozen coaches on the football and men’s basketball teams more than $10.5 million, 19 percent of total spending. At the top was Tommy Tuberville, UC’s head football coach, who received $3.8 million.