Tag Archives: Athletics

7/5/2012: At some point in the next few years the UO athletic department will announce plans for an expansion of Autzen stadium and Hayward field. We can expect that they will argue that sports has spillover economic benefits for Eugene. This is a dubious idea theoretically, since when people spend more on sports they spend less on other things. And it is not supported by the evidence. From a paper on NFL stadiums by the economist Kurt Rothoff:

Public subsidies for professional sports stadiums are often used as a means to stimulate economic development in local communities. Economic impact studies, as well as the politicians pushing them, claim that stadiums will induce job creation and revenue expansion. Using data on metropolitan statistical areas, academics find little to support the claims that stadiums help create jobs and increase the income in the local economy. This paper adds to the current literature by using detailed county level data to analyze the effect of a stadium on a smaller area around the stadium.

This study finds that employment within these industries (clothing, drinking, food, hotel, and liquor) have mixed results when a franchise is present, this is consistent with Coates and Humphrey’s (2003). However, although most of the payroll data is insignificant, the coefficients that are significant are all negative. This also supports Coates and Humphrey’s (2003) findings that real per capita income falls when sports franchises are present.

Results just in. I interpret this as a sharp rebuke by the UO Senate Intercollegiate Athletics Committee to Interim President Berdahl’s efforts to repudiate the 2004 Task Force report and the 2006 NCAA certification report, his efforts to gut the committee’s charge and shared governance, and Rob Mullens’ efforts to take UO student tuition for his own purposes while claiming to be self-supporting. Or maybe people just thought Brian would do a better job representing the diverse interests on the committee than Dev has done in the past. 6/7/2012.

4/11/2012: That’s what happened at the University of Illinois 3 weeks ago:

Hogan has been under fire since early January, when his chief of staff, Lisa Troyer, resigned after being accused of posing as a faculty senator in anonymous emails sent to a faculty group to influence its debate. Troyer said she did not write or send the emails, but an outside investigation determined she was the likely author.

I don’t think Interim President Berdahl’s use of administrative members of the Inter-collegiate Athletics Committee (Jim O’Fallon? Rob Mullens?) to forward him the emails on internal committee debates, or his efforts to get Dave Hubin to secretly persuade administrative members of the UO Senate to stall motions on the IAC charge are anywhere close to this. They are just a sign of the pervasive contempt that the UO administration has for the UO faculty and for the idea that those faculty should have any substantive role in the administration of the university.

Earlier this year Berdahl rejected a proposal to add just one faculty member to his “Executive Leadership Team”. One too many, I guess. Then there was the matter of former IAC chair Dev Sinha setting up a listserv for the executive committee, secretly adding Rob Mullens and Lorraine Davis to it, and then telling the IAC executive committee members that the listserv only included faculty. But that was last year, before Berdahl’s time. Of course, Mullens and Davis both knew all about this and kept their mouths shut, presumably while reading the emails. But surely that’s not a crime.

That’s UO’s Interim President Bob Berdahl, discussing athletic scandals. Results from a survey of college and university presidents show:

Exactly 75 percent of the presidents surveyed said colleges and universities spend too much on athletics, and only one out of every seven — just 13.1 percent— said that the presidents of big-time college athletics programs are in control their programs.

From Sam Stites in the ODE. More complete results here. 3/15/2012.

3/2/2012: Dave Duerson was a former college and NFL football star, suffering from brain injuries induced by concussions and repeated MTBI on the field. He was in denial for years, but in 2011, age 50, he realized the brain damage was serious and irreversible and was making him a violent threat to his family. So he shot himself in the heart. Why the heart? He wanted his brain to be used for research that might help other football players. And it was:

Sort of puts Chip Kelly’s troubles in perspective. Full report in the British newspaper The Guardian, by Ed Pilkington.

That would be at UC-Berkeley:

The Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Intercollegiate Athletics Financial Sustainability has been asked to:

• develop an understanding of the recent and current financial and competitive state of the Intercollegiate Athletics program;
• assess alternative approaches to promptly putting the IA program on a financially sustainable course;
• assess possible impacts of changes in the scope of the department on philanthropy to academic programs;
• develop a short list of promising alternatives, including the pros and cons of each.

While the University Athletics Board and the Academic Senate’s “Task Force on Intercollegiate Athletics” are exploring similar issues, the chancellor identified an opportunity to generate fresh perspectives through focused interaction between two of the campus’s most important constituencies.

Here at UO, our administration is still in denial about the true costs of the academic subsidies of our athletics programs.

2/14/2012: From the Philadelphia Inquirer. Penn State has now begun to post documents about the scandal and about university operations in general (budgets, contracts) at http://openness.psu.edu/

Meanwhile here at UO we still don’t know what the Kelly/Lyles scandal will cost – just that the jocks have convinced Randy Geller that the academic side must pay half the costs so far. And NYT columnist Joe Nocera continues spelunking the sewer that is the NCAA:

The N.C.A.A. despises sports agents — hates them so much so that it once helped promulgate an anti-agent law. As of January 2010, according to the N.C.A.A.’s Web site, that law had been passed by 40 states. A player who takes an “improper benefit” from a sports agent loses his eligibility. A player who gets drafted out of high school — this happens in baseball as well as hockey — and engages an agent to talk to the pro team that drafted him loses his eligibility. Indeed, the mere act of signing with an agent is enough for a player to lose his eligibility. N.C.A.A. “scandals” involving agents and athletes are almost as common as recruiting scandals.

The N.C.A.A. claims — as it always does — that it is acting to protect its athletes “from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.” But this is classic N.C.A.A. Orwellian spin. Its true purpose in preventing athletes from engaging with agents while in college is to exacerbate their exploitation. The professional and commercial enterprise doing the exploiting, of course, is college sports itself.

“It’s all about control,” says Don Jackson, a lawyer who specializes in representing athletes who have run afoul of the N.C.A.A. Teenage athletes with agents are far more likely to make informed decisions about their lives than athletes acting on their own. Instead, athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is the school, not the player.

I’d have written “athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is themselves, not the player.” These exploiters will leave UO in a heartbeat for a better offer – but if an athlete tries that, the NCAA enforcers will take away their eligibility!

2/13/2012: Good story in the Chronicle on the NCAA / NYT blogging fight.