Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Money talks and colleges listen
Bloomberg has a look at big money and big time college sports and how hard it is to deny anything to the cash cow that supports so much else.
“The revenue opportunities are so substantial that the pressure placed upon the athletic department and coach, specifically, make it ever more difficult to pursue a school’s mission,” Warren Zola, 44, assistant dean of graduate programs at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, said in a telephone interview from his Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, office...And you thought prostitution was illegal.
The dependence by U.S. universities on sports to help fund everything from money-losing gymnastics teams to general scholarships has created a system where the needs of coaches and their programs supersede the educational values of their institutions, said Robin Harris, executive director of the Ivy League, whose schools don’t give athletic scholarships.
It also creates an environment where a coach like Paterno, a Brooklyn, New York, native known as “JoePa” whose bronze statue stands outside 107,000-seat Beaver Stadium, had the power to tell the university’s president that he wouldn’t help raise another penny if the school’s top disciplinarian wasn’t fired for being too strict with his players.
“There is so much money tied into big-time college athletics that it forces some people to make bad decisions,” Harris said in a telephone interview. “They may be people affiliated with a program, or coaches and administrators who do things purposely wrong, or turn a blind eye, because they are focused on generating revenue and not necessarily the integrity of the enterprise.”
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