College athletics rely on funding from Universities, boosters that guarantee salaries within the athletic departments, ticket sales, and advertising. Times are hard, and the ethical question I raise is the following: Why shouldn't athletic departments and athletic conferences not scale back?
Athletes are not the problem...I couldn't imagine being a student athlete. The time demands, studying, trying to fit into a team and understand a system. It's very hard, and I don't want any cuts to come at the expense of the players.
This is the main reason why I was against in expanding the ACC as far South as Miami all the way North to Boston College. Besides the fact that geographically neither school fits with the other 10 schools, the cost to travel to these locations are expensive. Can schools afford to travel to Maui, the West Coast, or Alaska anymore? I don't know, but I'd like to see programs control the traveling that are teams make.
I think this affects the professional sports more so than college, but I don't think it is really an ethical question. If the sport is profitable, they should keep it. If not, pitch it. Problem is, the schools are all tied to eachother by revenue sharing aming other agreements, so it really is pretty complicated.
ReplyDeleteFor example, Duke's football program would be considered a burden to the rest of the ACC because it generates no revenue but shares in the revenues of the other schools. So should Duke cut back? It would likely need to be a group effort that would be difficult to implement especially when coaches won't take pay cuts.