Are College Sports Programs Too Big?
Here's something you've probably never questioned because it's just how things are: almost no other country in the world has college sports. American college athletics is roughly a $19 billion business, and in most states the highest-paid public employee is a football or basketball coach. Meanwhile the athletes whose games generate that money get scholarships instead of salaries — and at some of the richest programmes, they graduate at surprisingly low rates.
Reading List
These are shorter than most weeks. The Gallup one makes the case that college sports are good for the athletes; the Inside Higher Ed one makes the case that some athletes are being badly served. Read both properly.
Required
- Racial Gaps in the Power 5 — Inside Higher Ed
- Lasting Benefits of College Sports for Student-Athletes — Gallup
- NCAA Athletes Could Make $2 Million a Year If Paid Equitably — Forbes
- Will New Rules Make College Athletes Instant Millionaires? — The Guardian
- The Supreme Court Sides with NCAA Athletes — NPR
If You Want More
- The NCAA Sold Fans a Multi-Billion Dollar Story — The Atlantic (podcast)
- College Football 2.0 — CBS Sports, on conference realignment
One-Week Plan
Here's the shape of the week. Your guide will set the exact timing for your section.
Nobody Else Does This
Write first: are you a fan of college sports? If you are, why — and what makes them different from professional sports? If you're not, that's a useful perspective this week, not a gap.
Then the fact that reframes everything: almost no other country has college sports. In most places, universities have clubs at most. England's system is the closest — 50 sports across 170 universities — but athletic scholarships there are rare and small. Canada's covers 12 sports at 56 universities.
The NCAA oversees about 1,100 schools and more than 500,000 student-athletes. Nothing like it exists anywhere else on earth.
Then a bit of history, which shows how old the tradition is and how recent the money is. The first intercollegiate event was a sailing race between Yale and Harvard in 1852. Title IX opened college sports to women in 1972. And in 1994, the NCAA signed its first television mega-deal for the basketball tournament — that's when this became an industry. In 2014 Northwestern football players sued for the right to unionise and lost. In 2021 the Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA on athlete compensation.
Nineteen Billion Dollars
Start with a genuinely useful exercise: look up your state's annual budget and compare it to $19 billion. Big numbers mean nothing until you have something to hold them against.
Then work through:
- Where the money comes from — TV rights, licensing, advertising — and how much of it comes from just two sports, football and men's basketball.
- How much a top football programme actually profits.
- How much revenue grew over ten years, and how much scholarship spending grew over the same ten years. Compare those two numbers carefully.
- What coaches earn, and how that's changed.
- The map of the highest-paid public employee in each state. It's funny for about ten seconds.
And then the slide worth sitting with: put the list of top academic universities next to the list of top football programmes. There's barely any overlap. So — should there be? Should being good at football have anything to do with being good at teaching and research? However you answer that, you've just said something about what you think a university is for.
Scholarships, Graduation, and Who Actually Benefits
Two facts that sit awkwardly together:
- Student-athletes overall graduate at higher rates than everyone else. Why? Is being an athlete easy — or do athletes get tutoring, structure, and academic monitoring that other students don't? If it's the second, that raises an obvious question about who else could use that help.
- At the wealthiest conferences, Black male athletes graduate at strikingly low rates while being over-represented among athletes relative to the student body. If a scholarship doesn't end in a degree, what was it worth?
Also look carefully at how many athletes actually receive scholarships and how big the average one is. "Athletes get free college" turns out to describe far fewer people than you'd think.
And one methodological question worth asking about the Gallup data: people who played sports report better outcomes later — but is comparing athletes to non-athletes even a fair comparison?
Before you leave, find a resource to bring on Thursday.
Both Cases, Fully Made
For: scholarships make college affordable, and for some athletes they're the only way in. Profitable teams pay for other sports and activities that would otherwise disappear. Sports create a sense of community almost nothing else does. And honestly — they're fun. Would Notre Dame be Notre Dame without football?
Against: big programmes pull universities away from teaching and research. Community can be built more cheaply. Athletes generate millions and have no ability to negotiate for a share of it. And too many athletes in the money sports leave without a degree or much of an education.
The closing questions: should athletes in the profitable sports get paid? And if some are producing enormous revenue while receiving a poor education — is that exploitation, or a fair trade they chose?
One more thing: this deck was made before name-image-likeness deals really arrived. You've watched what happened next. Bring it.
Score Your Own Week
What went well, what to improve, what you learned, and whether anything you believed changed. Then the participation matrix. Be honest with yourself.