More than a few tongues are wagging around Texas Longhorn athletic circles this week over this blistering Texas Observer op-ed on the UT football program authored by UT professor Tom Palaima, who just happens to serve on the UT Faculty Advisory Committee on Budgets and is UTís representative on the Big 12 steering committee of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics. Hereís a flavor of the article:
The NCAA program at the University of Texas at Austin generated $138 million in revenue last year, $87 million from football. Yet its profit margin is less than $2 million. The programís cumulative debt and debt service are in the high-risk neighborhood.
Longhorns Inc. has wrapped its tentacles around the now-hemorrhaging academic budget. The athletics department gave a $2 million raise to head football coach Mack Brown as colleges across the university are laying off staff. In foreign languages alone, $1.6 million was cut. The head of the student union recently announced the closure of the Cactus CafÈ, a historic music venue, to save just $66,000 over two years.
Worse, the university has ceded trademark and royalty revenues. Longhorns Inc. keeps 90 percent of this income, roughly $10.6 million last year. The yearly debt payment on building bonds for the nearly $300 million in stadium expansions since 1998 is $15 million. The debt run up by the athletics department has risen from $64.4 million in 2004-05 to a staggering $222.5 million in 2008-09.
Unfortunately, Palaima main criticism is how well the UT athletic department and its personnel are doing financially in comparison to the UT academics, whose average salary has increased by ìonlyî 30 percent over the past 20 years or so.
Somehow, however, Palaima utterly misses the most corrupt aspect of big-time intercollegiate athletics. That is, the perverse and discriminatory regulatory scheme that restricts compensation to the players ñ mostly young black men ñ whose talent actually generates most of the wealth for the athletic departments.
As Iíve noted many times, big-time college football and basketball is an entertaining form of corruption. Too bad that someone as bright as Professor Palaima fails to understand the true nature of that corruption.
By the way, below is a video of a lively debate between Professor Palaima and longtime UT Law professor Lino Graglia over college football in which Palaima is actually the defender of the entreprise (a colleague asked Palaima ìDeLoss Dodds must have given you priority seating at [Darrell K. Royal-Memorial Stadium]î. The transcript of the debate is here.