May 23, 2012, 5:00 am
By Brad Wolverton
Earlier this month, the Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari caused a stir by ending his university’s longstanding rivalry with Indiana over his refusal to play games on the Hoosiers’ home court.
“No other program is losing five or six players a year” to the NBA, he wrote on his blog. “This is a players-first program, and you cannot put a young team into situations that are not fair to the players.”
Instead of subjecting his young phenoms to challenging road games in opposing team’s gyms, he is insisting that his team play many of those nonconference games in large, off-campus arenas to better prepare his players for the NCAA tournament. The move gives UK’s supporters more opportunities to buy tickets to those neutral-site games, he says, and will increase revenue for the athletic department.
But the approach isn’t sitting well with a group of professors who have long opposed…
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May 18, 2012, 3:14 pm
By Brad Wolverton
When the Big Ten Network was started five years ago, it offered each member university the chance to produce up to 60 hours a year of academic programming. Since then the channel has aired thousands of hours of shows highlighting scholarly work.
But this year the network is running less academic coverage as part of a new emphasis on higher-quality broadcasts that bring in better ratings, the Associated Press reports.
“When we came up with the number of hours, we didn’t know what the schools were capable of producing,” Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany told the news service. “Most of them didn’t have the resources to produce the shows.”
“There’s fewer hours now,” he adds, “but the ratings are better and the production value is much better—top-notch, in fact.”
The change hasn’t gone over well with some people. Kecia Lynn hosted a program produced by the University of Iowa in…
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May 17, 2012, 10:11 pm
By Brad Wolverton
The NCAA is considering strict new penalties against head coaches that would hold them increasingly accountable for the actions of their assistants, ESPN.com reports. Under the proposed penalties, head coaches could be suspended for 5 to 100 percent of games during a season based on the severity of their assistants’ violations.
Under current NCAA rules, head coaches are presumed to have knowledge of what goes on in their programs and can be held responsible for the actions of their assistants.
The proposed change would do away with presumption, ESPN.com’s Ivan Maisel reports, making the head coach responsible for his assistants’ actions regardless of his knowledge of them.
If the change is approved, head coaches could face sanctions for any number of violations, including assistants’ impermissible calls to recruits.
The idea, one of many under consideration by an NCAA rules…
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May 16, 2012, 5:00 am
By Brad Wolverton
“When we make it, we have a right to spend it,” Texas’s football coach Mack Brown tells USA Today Sports. “That’s the way America is.”
Brown, who earns more than $5-million a year, is Exhibit A of the Longhorns’ largesse. He pockets more than four NCAA Division I institutions spend on their entire athletics program, USA Today reports. (Under Brown, Texas won the national title in 2005, but has gone 13-12 the past two seasons.)
Texas, one of 22 Division I public institutions to operate in the black, has plenty to go around. Last year it brought in more (just over $150-million) and spent more ($133.7 million) on sports than more than 200 public Division I colleges, according to the newspaper’s annual database of spending in big-time college sports. Ohio State was a distant second in both categories.
Texas and Ohio State aren’t the only department with deep pockets. Ten programs…
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May 10, 2012, 1:04 pm
By Brad Wolverton
When Florida State’s athletic department announced last week that it may have to cut its teams’ recruiting and travel budgets by 10 percent to fill a $2.4-million budget shortfall, the story had a familiar ring. Just six months ago, Maryland said it was eliminating eight sports in response to a $4.7-million budget hole.
While the deficit sizes are considerably different, the root of the problems is the same. Both ACC programs have seen steady declines in football ticket sales and a sharp falloff in booster support. And the way the two athletic departments communicated their problems has caused them even more fallout.
Sagging football attendance is the main reason for Florida State’s budget shortfall. For a program accustomed to competing for national titles, going 26-14 over the past three seasons apparently isn’t cutting it for many fans.
Donations are way off, too. Four years …
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May 7, 2012, 5:18 pm
By Brad Wolverton
Lot of good coverage today about the departure of Big East commissioner John Marinatto, which the league announced Monday.
The conference’s crucial mistake with Marinatto came in looking to the past for a vision of the future, writes ESPN.com’s Dana O’Neil. “What exactly is this league? And more, what does it want to be?” she asks. “Right now it is nothing but an amoebic blob. Big? Yes. East? No. Relevant? Not really.”
Marinatto was pushed out because he was powerless to stop the growing gap between the league’s basketball and football members, says ESPN.com’s Andrea Adelson. And good luck to his successor, whose job is the toughest in college football.
Marinatto’s ouster was “long overdue,” one source told USA Today Sports. But former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese came to his defense, telling the New York Times that Marinatto helped resurrect the league in 2005, when…
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May 4, 2012, 1:07 pm
By Brad Wolverton
Take your pick on which is the most damning statement about the Rutgers athletic department, based on a report by Bloomberg News this week examining spending in big-time sports:
a) Rutgers gave $28.5-million from the university budget and student fees, or almost $1,000 per student, to finance sports during the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011.
b) The $19.4-million that Rutgers allocated to athletics from its general budget would have been enough to hire about 256 assistant professors or 132 full professors, based on salary figures provided by the university.
c) Fiscal 2011 included the first losing football season in six years. Ticket sales for all sports, led by football, plunged by $3.1-million; donations fell $1.5-million; and income from royalties and licensing declined $477,558.
It was the second-consecutive year that Rutgers topped Bloomberg’s list of universities that…
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April 30, 2012, 8:43 pm
By Brad Wolverton
These days, the surest way to sully your name in college basketball is to restrict players from contacting other institutions when they want to transfer out of your program. Coaches at Saint Joseph’s, Maryland, and Wisconsin have all suffered publicity blows in recent months after their institutions limited certain athletes from freely talking to other teams, keeping them from earning scholarships elsewhere.
Last week Southern Illinois even took the unusual step of publicizing an athlete’s grade-point average as evidence of why he shouldn’t be allowed to leave. (The Salukis require players to have a 2.6 GPA to transfer so it doesn’t harm the team’s Academic Progress Rate. The player in question, Treg Setty, has a 2.5.)
Critics question why athletes aren’t granted the same freedom as coaches, who can move in and out of programs without penalty. Players, on the other hand, often…
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April 27, 2012, 5:00 am
By Brad Wolverton
As leaders of the Bowl Championship Series inched closer toward establishing a playoff for college football, they made another less-publicized but also significant move this week, scrapping the controversial automatic entry that wealthy conferences get into the most lucrative bowls. That change has the potential to affect recent shifts in conference alignment.
According to ESPN, BCS commissioners and athletic directors have agreed to eliminate the practice of designating conferences as “AQ” and “non-AQ” leagues, a policy that gives the wealthiest conferences favored entry into BCS bowls.
Under current BCS rules, champions of the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC receive an automatic spot in one of the five BCS bowl games. Champions of Conference USA, the Mid-American, Mountain West, Sun Belt, and Western Athletic conferences have to meet other criteria to qualify for…
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April 25, 2012, 5:00 am
By Brad Wolverton
As college football’s power brokers meet this week to consider the fate of the Bowl Championship Series, new evidence of extravagant revenues in the biggest bowls could help squeeze those bowls out of the most lucrative part of future postseason play.
According to a Yahoo! Sports report, the Sugar Bowl charged LSU more than $500,000 for ticket requests to this season’s national championship game. Game officials demanded $350 a seat from everyone from the president ($700 for two tickets) to players’ family members ($254,800) to every member of the band ($182,830 for 529 seats, including one just to hold the tuba).
It’s all part of what Yahoo! describes as a “cutthroat capitalism that has made these games and the people that run them rich.” And as athletic directors and conference commissioners decide what role bowls should play in a reconfigured postseason, there appears to be an in…
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