Not So Fun Article- Sarge Plays Bad Cop to Politi's Good Cop
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Trying to figure out how to read the article but this has been my question for a while….
WTF does the AD spend on?
Especially as we are doubling and tripling our media revenue from just a couple years ago.
We all laugh at and mock the media for calling out the Uber East expenses. And rally around the AD.
But does the AD have any control? What type of auditing is going on?
WTF does the AD spend on?
Especially as we are doubling and tripling our media revenue from just a couple years ago.
We all laugh at and mock the media for calling out the Uber East expenses. And rally around the AD.
But does the AD have any control? What type of auditing is going on?
Really good read. Lots of great nuggets in there. I’ve been in favor of the University spending more in Athletics for years so that sounds promising to hear Holloway’s recent remarks which align with previous statements from him.
Also would be great if they erase internal debt (and come up with big money for the new football facility).
Also would be great if they erase internal debt (and come up with big money for the new football facility).
If Football and Basket all could keep all the ticket, tv and donation revenue they would both be self sufficient. The problem is they don't make enough money to pay for the olympic sports.
A large amount of olympic sport athletes are non scholarship/partial scholarship regular students. Why are they treated differently from the drama club, debate team, orchestra, etc? Those are expected to turn a profit. but we expect olympic sports to.
A large amount of olympic sport athletes are non scholarship/partial scholarship regular students. Why are they treated differently from the drama club, debate team, orchestra, etc? Those are expected to turn a profit. but we expect olympic sports to.
RU sports will never get rid of the debt or subsidy. Holloway doesn't really care and understands why. Killingsworth needs new material after 30 years of saying the same shit
Exactly! The average Joe reads this and says "Why are we paying all this money for a losing football program!" If we shit canned the non-revenue sports we would probably be in good shape (not that I want to do that).
Yeah thanks. Was wondering if there were any real insights in there as to the cause and if they acknowledged it wasn't the FB and MBB that wasn't the driver. Sounds like a no.
Any mention of the Men's Soccer just winning the B1G Championship?
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Did they take into account the B1G revenue and likelihood it grows substantially with USC and UCLA?
This is the first time I can remember someone from RU coming out and saying the athletic department will never be self-sustaining. Personally, I did believe that eventually, with huge revenue from the Big 10, it might be possible. But as the article analogy says, as you make more, you raise your standard of living and you spend more. So we're never going to get there and people need to get over it.
Our University President has been a good hire.
Our University President has been a good hire.
You left out the word NOT.. the drama club is NOT expected to turn a profit. But I'd expect that, say, the track team spends more than all the other non-sports clubs in total. And this is to compete in the Big Ten and without enough Big Ten sports, we wouldn't have Big Ten basketball and football and all its revenues. Same for Title IX compliance... costs us a fortune but is fair to women.. and men who want to compete as women, I suppose.
To me, the real question is sports or not sports in college. People can make legit arguments that sports should have no place in academia. But once you open that can of worms you have to question all sorts of things in colleges. From academic subjects to all sorts of odd departments. I personally thing that here, in America, we have always valued athletics and, in particular, team sports. And I think many would agree.. that's why we have sports in high school and below... on the public dime.
So, once you say that sports, on any level, is okay to continue into college.. you have okayed spending on athletics. Then the question becomes.. but how much is okay? I think of this as a market test. Why should the athletes of New Jersey have less opportunity at its own flagship state university than, say, flyover state Kansas does? Kansas, who fields at least 2 D1 programs.. Kansas, Kansas State, not certain about Wichita State.
This athletic spending is a tiny percentage of Rutgers overall spending. Definitely less than 2% in the big view of things. And in terms of the entire state budget... please. Let's stop all the whining and go find some real wasteful spending somewhere else. If they look at the budget and find fraud, graft and corruption somewhere in athletics, that's a useful story. Even wasteful spending is a legit story, if told properly. But they make sero effort to put it into perspective as shown by others and in this message.
On the one hand, it's absurd to talk about anything at a university being money-losing or money-making. Do the student lounges or history classes turn a profit? Colleges are non-profit; they don't exist to make money. On the other hand, athletic departments do suck up a lot of money and given these growing revenue streams from the media it is fair to ask where the money is all going. Sports gets tens of millions more than they used to get and STILL there's a loss??
Lou....for anyone paying attention, it's always been an arms race. always will be. there was never any possibility for break even, let alone profit.
it used to be that we needed to keep pace with WVU etc., and now we need to keep pace with others in our neighborhood.
And football IS the main culprit. Sure, the olympic sports can't support themselves but they aren't the main drain. The more football brings in, the more football spends. Have we paid off the stadium expansion debt yet ?
It is what it is. This is what it means to be a P5 university.
it used to be that we needed to keep pace with WVU etc., and now we need to keep pace with others in our neighborhood.
And football IS the main culprit. Sure, the olympic sports can't support themselves but they aren't the main drain. The more football brings in, the more football spends. Have we paid off the stadium expansion debt yet ?
It is what it is. This is what it means to be a P5 university.
Did you read the article? Where did they knock us down? Seemed good reporting with great quotes from our university president.
That is America today. nJ.com ran with a very negative and inflammatory headline.
“Ten years into the Big Ten, will Rutgers athletics ever stop bleeding money?”
95% of people who read that headline won’t read the article , and they’ll walk away with the now “fact” that RU athletics spending is out of control , costing our state huge amounts of money, directly taking money out of their pockets , is mis-managed. Etc. That’s what the headline leads you to assume .
Everything requires context , perspective and relative comparison.
Nearly every athletic department in the country , high school or college is in the red. It costs money to run sports . After a quick search , only ~20 college athletics departments make money. And I’m sure the accounting methods are wildly different for many schools.
The headline makes you believe that they should be profitable while that isn’t even the target for just about any school.
Now put in perspective what is Rutgers spending compared to all peer schools. And perhaps add in the context that we’re catching up from decades of not spending at all !
The headline alone is extremely harmful to Rutgers reputation and perception amongst its stakeholders. And that is a big deal and borderline irresponsible by the editors to run with a headline like that.
The article had so many logical holes, it’s not even funny. A proper analysis would have taken the total OPERATING debt over ten years and divide that by ten, with projections for expenses and Big 10 revenue. The existing debt to enlarge the stadium should be treated separately because that is a capital expense, and facilities and parking lots are used for other events, including graduations, HS football championships, convocation, etc. Some colleges, including Florida State, added classrooms when they expanded their stadiums so that they could be counted as academic buildings rather than falling under the athletic department budget. Let’s also not forget the dramatic drop in state funding for Higher Ed over the last few decades, which could have at least partially funded athletics programs.
There are many other dimensions to this misleading article, but people will only remember the inflammatory headline.
There are many other dimensions to this misleading article, but people will only remember the inflammatory headline.
its hard for me to take any article seriously that complains about the amount Rutgers athletics is losing, but yet makes zero mention of Title IX. You want to get rid of the subsidies, that's quite simple to do. Get rid of Title IX, and therefore the requirement to fund all these money losing non-revenue programs, and all will be fine. I am certainly not advocating for that outcome, but rather just making a point regarding how disingenuous these conversations are. Its like a company with 20 divisions, of which only 2 are profitable, and the rest lose money. The CEO wants to cut the 18 money losers and just focus on the 2 money makers,, but the Board of Directors tells him he can't because they have been deemed 'socially important'. And then they yell at him later because the company is still losing money overall. It's shameful.
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This^^ Lazy reporting by Sarge just bringing up the same old headline. This isn't the ACCC, we are in the BIG now and the revenue being brought in due to that will help in countless ways beyond athletics.
Agreed, and i didn't even bother getting into all the benefits being in the B1G brings to the University which can't even be quantified (awareness, image advertising, higher enrollment #'s, access to research, etc, etc). All these clowns are doing is cherry-picking 'facts' that fit their narrative. Because they know if they share the entire picture, their story falls apart.
That is the topic of the next article in their series. "How the BIG has impacted the university as a whole".
I have the Rutgers/NJ.com app, and I can't get to the story, even though I can get to other "subscriber exclusives." Any idea why I can't?
FWIW, the writer of an article does not write the headline.
FWIW, the writer of an article does not write the headline.
I think the point is other P5 programs manage to have a full spectrum of both male and female athletics without operating at the deficit we do..
Hard to weigh in on that, as they didnt provide any numbers to substantiate that claim. I am a CPA, and my guess is that some of that discrepancy may come down to funky accounting. How are debt loads, etc being allocated to the athletics programs and is it being done consistently across the schools? The answer is no, and that certainly can skew the results. There is certainly a lot of red tape at RU, but I can't imagine our spending is dramatically out of line with other P5 schools. If anything, we are overly cheap.
We are playing catch up. We really never took this commitment to college sports seriously until recently. It is going to cost money to do this. The $75M per year is a really nice bonus. Going forward one of the big drivers to closing the deficit is a football team that is having success on the field. It is going to take time. Thankfully we have a President of our university who experienced college athletics personally who supports this mission. The naysayers are a distraction. Support our sports teams
There is a middle ground.
It doesn't seem our AD has historically been very efficient with spending.
Even with our reduced payouts (due to loan paybacks) we are receiving more than 90% of Athletic Departments, approx?
We are never going to outspend the top of our conference.
(#BanDonorMoney).
We have to be smarter than every other AD.
It doesn't stop with the HC.
The entire AD needs to figure out how to do more with less.
The solution isn't "It's the fans fault. They need to donate more. We can't hire/fire HC XYZ because we don't have the money".
Plus, Holloway know he's in no jeopardy of losing his job because Mark Killingsworth is unhappy with Rutgers Athletics, and Rutgers Athletics knows it's going to keep getting its deficits paid by the university as long as Bob Barchi or Jonathan Holloway or the next guy/gal is the president, so everyone should take a page from Jonathan Holloway's hymnal and stop caring that people are "outraged" about Rutgers's athletics spending.
"Outrage" is New Jersey's state bird. Let it just fly away, as it inevitably does. We're still going to play football and men's basketball every year.
Frankly, the only ones who get to be outraged -- in my opinion -- are the men's rowers, swimmers, divers, and tennis players. But even then, we're still gonna play the other sports.
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