“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 policies leading college sports toward professionalization.

On Tuesday, leaders of the group—the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, an alliance of 59 faculty senates from Football Bowl Subdivision programs—urged potential Kentucky opponents to refrain from signing contracts with the Wildcats on such terms.

“We call on all those who support the collegiate model of athletics to speak out against this further move to professionalize college sports, and—most importantly—to decline to participate in such a separation of competitions from campuses,” said a statement from the coalition’s steering committee. The Kentucky program “is no longer designed to provide students pursuing a college education the opportunity to compete, it is designed to train professional basketball players.”

(Photo by Bryan Horowitz from Wikimedia Commons)

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 which she interviewed prominent authors associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. That show has since been cancelled, the AP says.

Instead, the network is focusing on shows like “Impact the World,” an original series that has described Big Ten universities’ work, for example, with rare brain diseases.

The Big Ten’s presidents authorized the network to spend $500,000 to hire a production company for that series, says network spokeswoman Elizabeth Conlisk. And that show’s ratings are 10 times better than the channel’s other non-sports shows.

“You can have 500 hours of programming that nobody watched, and 10 hours that people do watch that have just as many viewers,” she told The Chronicle. “Our goal is to have the highest-quality shows as possible.”

(Photo by Bill Adams of the University of Iowa’s Kevin Kelley, a video producer working on a documentary for the Big Ten Network)

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 working group, is already meeting resistance from coaches.

“I guess they expect us to become compliance officers,” Maryland football coach Randy Edsall told ESPN.com.

Boston College football coach Frank Spaziani said a coach’s intent should be considered.

“There’s a difference between cheating and breaking a rule,” Spaziani said. “From the president to the athletic director to my staff, everybody knows what the rules are. We don’t cheat. If somebody breaks a rule and ‘Coach A’ is suspended, people will say he’s a cheater. The public perception is, he’s cheating.”

(Photo from RandyEdsall.com)

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 made or spent more than $100-million a year ago, USA Today‘s findings show. Nearly two dozen topped $80-million.

And in the past year alone, spending at the 227 Division I colleges USA Today surveyed rose by $267-million.

Those numbers concern some former leaders, especially as states reduce their support of higher education. “There’s nothing to stop Texas or other very successful financial enterprises with these gigantic television contracts from continuing to grow, grow, grow because their revenues match their expenditures,” former Arizona President Peter Likins told USA Today. “But the disconnect between what’s happening in athletics and what’s happening elsewhere in the same universities creates stress, and … the stresses will create a breakdown.”

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

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 ago, Seminole Boosters reported total revenue of $42.8-million, according to its tax records. In its most recently reported year, it brought in $32.7-million.

And those aren’t the athletic department’s only financial problems. In February, Moody’s Investor Services downgraded the revenue-bond rating of FSU Financial Assistance, a unit of Seminole Boosters, after it had to come up with extra money to prop up the athletics program.

Maryland and Florida State also appeared to communicate their budget difficulties in much the same way, notifying university oversight committees and coaches long after the problems started. That irked some trustees at Maryland, and didn’t sit too well with one powerful former Florida State trustee.

“We have some very, very good coaches here,” Seminole booster Jim Smith, a former chair of the university’s Board of Trustees, told the Tallahassee Democrat. “When they wake up and realize that they have less resources than these schools that are raising [their budgets] 15 to 20 percent a year, then they will be gone.”

At a meeting of the university’s athletics board, Smith pushed Florida State to do a better job of reaching out to donors to help offset the budget shortfall. And he said boosters would come through. “I’ll write a big check myself,” he said, “as long as I know others will, too.”

Of course, many of these problems could go away for Florida State if its much-touted 2012 football recruiting class produces as expected.

But the challenges in both programs are a reminder that even the big boys can stumble, especially when so much is riding on one sport.

(Photo from Florida State)

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 Tranghese was busy worrying about how to dissolve it.

Among the big questions facing the league:

* How will the change impact the conference’s upcoming TV negotiations?

* Will the new football members renege on their commitments given the league’s possible decrease in guaranteed bowl revenue?

* What’s to stop future defections, including Louisville, Cincinnati, Connecticut, Rutgers, and Notre Dame?

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 provide the biggest subsidies for sports. Rutgers officials defended the spending, saying it represents less than 1 percent of the university’s overall budget and provides positive exposure for the institution. (After you cancel out all the media drubbing, that’s kind of hard to imagine.)

Among the other highlights from the Bloomberg report:

* While none of the other 53 public institutions Bloomberg surveyed came close to giving as much to sports as Rutgers, Oregon State actually nudged out the Scarlet Knights on one count: Students there pay an average of $1,050.76 each per year toward intercollegiate athletics.

* Six of the surveyed institutions reported no financial support for athletics from the university or student fees, including Texas, which had the largest budget ($150.3-million) and No. 2 Ohio State ($131.8-million).

* Filling out the top five in subsidies for sports were Oregon State ($17-million); South Florida ($16.6-million); Maryland ($15.9-million); and Colorado ($15.5-million).

For more nuggets, be sure to check out this nifty graphic showing subsidies for all 54 programs.

(Photo from Rutgers U.)

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 aren’t allowed to transfer within their conference or to certain teams, and they usually miss a year of eligibility for making a move.

According to the NCAA’s “permission to contact” rule, athletes looking to transfer must receive the permission of their current institution before they can speak to other programs or be recruited by other teams. If players get the green light, and they satisfy progress-toward-degree requirements at their current college, they may be eligible to receive athletic aid from a different program.

The situation is much different in Division III, where the players themselves have the power to dictate when other Division III institutions may speak to them.

Given the negative publicity many top programs have faced this year, that approach may be a better one for Division I, says Brad Barnes, an assistant compliance director at Texas A&M.

Barnes likens the transfer turnstile to divorce, saying that players and programs that can’t work out their differences should just be allowed to go their separate ways.

He still believes in restrictions–athletes have playbook secrets, after all–but he thinks programs would do themselves a favor by letting go of players more readily.

“In my personal opinion, when you consider the public-relations damage to the institution and the coach and the AD, it would behoove the NCAA membership to have a serious conversation about where we want to go with this rule, which to a degree has become a liability,” he says.

Barnes recently asked someone at the NCAA for a legislative history of the rule–Bylaw 13.1.1.3–trying to understand why it was created and when it was last reviewed.

It bothers him that some people in the media have misinterpreted the regulation. “People unfortunately think the rule can prevent an athlete from transferring,” he says. In reality, athletes can leave whenever they want–they just can’t accept a scholarship at another four-year NCAA or NAIA institution, or receive assistance in the admissions process, without their own program granting a release.

Although Barnes likes Division III’s self-release model, he doesn’t see Division I colleges adopting it anytime soon.

“This is a rule that’s deeply entrenched in the culture of NCAA schools, for better or worse,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going to change that.”

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 one of those bowls.

Last season, automatic-qualifier conferences brought in more than $20-million each from BCS bowl revenues. By contrast, the Mountain West received $12.8-million, and the WAC $4. 1-million, according to ESPN.

If the AQ goes away, it would harm leagues like the Big East the most. Three times in the last five seasons, the Big East had the lowest-ranked conference champion of the six AQ leagues, ESPN’s Andrea Adelson reports. And three out of the last four seasons, the Big East representative had three or more losses. Without its automatic qualifier, the league likely wouldn’t have been invited to some of the high-profile bowl games it played in.

The elimination of the automatic qualifier could also jeopardize the Big East’s recent expansion. Boise State left the Mountain West in football in part because it wanted a league with an automatic invitation to BCS bowls. Although the Broncos have pledged to stay no matter what happens with the automatic qualifier, they wouldn’t be penalized for leaving. If they left, it wouldn’t be the first time the league lost a new member before officially joining; TCU reneged on its offer last year, moving to the Big 12 instead.

BCS officials hope to decide on the format for a college football playoff by July 4.

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons.)

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 increasing agitation to squeeze those bowls out.

“Everything has changed in the last couple of years,” one big-time athletic director told Yahoo! “There’s a feeling that it’s time to do it ourselves.”

After nearly a century and a half, college football appears on the verge of establishing a playoff in which the four top teams could square off. If that happens, it’s possible that those games could be played separately from the bowls. There’s also talk that teams could have to win seven games to qualify for a bowl, rather than the six they must win now. That could eliminate some of the 35 bowl games.

Cutting off the major bowls from the lucrative television revenue to the championship-round games would eat away at their potential revenues and could lead to cutbacks in their hefty spending (some bowl officials earn as much as $800,000 a year).

Bill Hancock, executive director of the BCS, defended the bowls’ practice of charging for seats.

“The schools love being able to [provide family tickets] for their players, but they don’t want to spend the money for it,” he told Yahoo! “The conference could take less money as a payout from the bowls and have them comp the tickets, but it would be less money flowing to the schools one way or the other.”

As bowl games lobby to hold onto their assets, rhetoric like that isn’t likely to help the industry keep its profitable place at the table.

(LSU photo)