Sunday, April 17, 2016

Most college athletics programs outspend themselves

One evening during the Final Four in Indianapolis, I went to the hotel fitness center. Before starting my workout, I turned the TV to the comedy channel. I didn't catch what country the first comedian was from, but he was commenting on how seriously Americans take sports. Every broadcast, he said, was an unrivaled recitation of statistics.

He dramatized a typical soccer game broadcast in Latin America, where one commentator asked the other one what he thought would happen, and the other replied, "no one knows." A similar conversation on TV in the US would get this response:

"The last time a left-handed black man rose to this level of competition was in 1972....."

We're the only country on the globe that marries sports with higher learning institutions. Which makes this article pertinent:

Most college athletic programs outspend themselves. Can they keep up this pace?

Check out this paragraph:

“A very small number of the 1,100 (NCAA members) have a positive cash flow on college sports, so those schools are making a decision that having a successful athletic program is valuable to them despite the fact they have to subsidize it with institutional money,” Emmert says. “The same thing is true for a lot of academic programs. So every school has to sit down and say, 'What is this worth to us?’ ”

I'm quite sure that before any college sports are shut down, there would be a Congressional act with a new budget designed to keep them afloat.

College coach news:

Trina Patterson has been named head coach at North Carolina-Greensboro.

New George Washington coach Jen Rizzotti is excited about the future.

WNBA news:

Army's Kelsey Minato may get a shot at the WNBA.

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