Selena Roberts writes about a topic I've complained about bitterly since I attended one of those schools with two kinds of students: athletes and everyone else. Just pay 'em above the table, and stop the charade already! I don't begrudge folks their entertainment choices, but stop pretending the student athlete exists when less than a quarter of the team ever graduates. Not saying athletes are retards, all of them anyway, but they have a different function in universities - winning sports contests.
Selena Roberts: Big-Time College Sports May Be Due for an Audit How does the luxurious splendor of high-end college football square with the purpose of higher education? The Tax Man wants to know.It was a five-star slumber party. By 7:30 p.m. Friday, Florida Gator players were wandering the hallways of the Sawgrass Marriott Resort and Spa with pillows tucked under their arms.
They weren’t wearing their pj’s but identical blue warm-ups. They weren’t painting each other’s toenails, but, and this is unknown, the fellas might have indulged in an oxygen facial to polish up their game face.
As it was, the lugs were lying on the floor of a hotel ballroom for a players-only movie, stretching out after feasting on endless silver platters of man food in the ballroom next door.
It beats the dorm and Domino’s. What’s an expense budget when more than $1.2 million a season is dedicated to the team’s travel? The University of Florida is located only 80 minutes from Alltel Stadium — where the team held off Georgia, 21-14, in yesterday’s annual border scrum — but the Gators rode the extra mile a day before the game to relax a half-hour away in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.
The team effectively turned a school day into a spa day.
How does the luxurious splendor of high-end college football square with the purpose of higher education?
The Tax Man wants to know. In what amounts to a moral audit, Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, recently sent a letter to the money-grab artists at the nonprofit N.C.A.A., asking it to justify its tax-exempt status with some barbed questions:
Tags: Football
With corporate sponsorships, lucrative TV deals and millionaire coaches with no academic duties, Thomas asked, “What actions has the N.C.A.A. taken to retain a clear line of demarcation between major college sports and professional sports?”¶Given that federal taxpayers have no interest in which universities generate visibility and contributions through athletic success, Thomas asked, “Why should the federal government subsidize the athletic activities of educational institutions when that subsidy is being used to help pay for escalating coaches’ salaries, costly chartered travel and state-of-the-art athletic facilities?”
¶With Texas, the defending Division I-A football champion, graduating 29 percent of its players compared with 74 percent of the university’s student body for the class that entered in 1998, Thomas asked, “How well is the N.C.A.A. accomplishing its tax-exempt purpose of maintaining the athlete as an integral part of the student body?”
¶The N.C.A.A. added an extra football game to the schedule and lengthened the basketball season, so Thomas asked, “How do these proposals help athletes improve academic performance?”
Excellent questions. But what’s the political point of frisking the N.C.A.A. for loaded pockets?
“It is not an insignificant event,” said the economist Andrew Zimbalist, author of “The Bottom Line: Observations and Arguments on Sports Business.” He added, “Although these politicians are grandstanding in my view, I’d rather have them grandstanding than be silent.”
Peacock politicians can be effective. Congress took the stage to shame Major League Baseball and scared it straight into the admission of a drug problem. And as the Ways and Means Committee probes America’s nonprofit sector, it may hold the N.C.A.A. accountable to its unholy binge shopping.
“I think all of us in higher education — the conferences, the N.C.A.A. — we should be worried about this,” said David Williams, a tax lawyer and vice chancellor at Vanderbilt, where administrators have successfully folded athletics back into education. “The tax code is one of the largest pieces of social legislation. You can encourage and discourage certain behaviors.
”I believe the government is saying: ‘You’ve been told time and time again to link athletics to higher education, and we’re not seeing that. You’re not able to control yourself.’ “
It’s a deep spiral on a post pattern to the bank. More than 10 Division I-A universities pay their football and basketball coaches a combined $3 million a year. At Texas, Mack Brown ($2.6 million) and Rick Barnes ($1.8 million) exceed $4 million. At Florida, it’s enough to pay Urban Meyer ($2.1 million) and Billy Donovan ($1.6 million), but the Gators have also been on the hook for $2.6 million in severance payments.
”The question is,“ Williams said, ”where is that money coming from?“
The sugar daddies of college sports. Boosters receive up to an 80 percent tax deduction on gifts to the program. Every check writer — from the Oklahoma State Santa T. Boone Pickens ($165 million) to the Tennessee benefactor Peyton Manning ($1 million) — may be in line for an atta-boy from their accountants.
Peek inside the 990 tax forms at nonprofit booster clubs and you’ll discover charity’s payoff. At Florida State, not only did Seminole Booster Inc. raise $42 million in direct public support, according to its 2004 tax documents, but the president of the club was paid $228,184 in salary.
Booster czars don’t just hang up the signup sheets for tailgate casseroles, anymore. They oversee friends of the program who have penthouse tastes. Bull Gators — the grand pooh-bah of Florida boosters — can use their nonprofit devotion as a business perk by purchasing a luxury suite for $48,000 with the sweet bonus of air-conditioning at the Swamp.
What’s too much? Is it Texas spending $150 million for a stadium expansion? Is it Georgia pouring nearly $7 million into an academic center to prop up struggling athletes? It is the five-star hotel football players at the University of Colorado have been known to stay in the night before a home game?
The excess only serves to loot the soul of higher education. It’s enough to make Congress suspicious.
”I think Congress wants to know: Do you look more like a for-profit rather than a nonprofit?“ Williams said.
Imagine the market correction if the free money disappeared for the N.C.A.A. That’s not a pompom you hear, but the sound of the N.C.A.A. shaking. It has until Nov. 13 to respond to Thomas. So far, the N.C.A.A. has only offered a statement in its weak defense, ”The N.C.A.A. disagrees with the fundamental assertion that intercollegiate athletics is not part of higher education.“
Just how is a team spa day part of higher education?
Corruption is a contagious disease. With the present level of corruption in the USA, it will be hard to find an organism imune to it.