Economics Of College Sports

Operating behind a veil of amateurism, the NCAA and collegiate athletic departments oversee big business sports programs. These entities generate revenues comparable to professional sports, practice and play in facilities that rival those found in professional sports, and pay their top coaches salaries comparable to the salaries paid to coaches of professional sports teams. Athletes are courted with lavish stadiums, training facilities, and locker rooms. Customers are wooed with branded apparel, videos, logos, and advertisements. Business interests are captured with stadium billboards, electronic ads on scoreboards, sponsorship of bowl games, logos on uniforms, and exclusive apparel and equipment contracts. Where do, or should, these lucrative athletic ventures fit in the mission of higher education? To what extent is the central mission of creating an environment for learning and extending the frontiers of knowledge enhanced or limited by college sports? Are declarations by the NCAA to promote amateurism and competitive balance supportive of the university mission? Does the NCAA even follow its purported objectives? The Economics of College Sports contains both empirical and theoretical research to address these and related issues. Perhaps the most unique contributions focus on the interactions between legal and institutional aspects of the NCAA and their impact on the objectives and goals of university education; all of the contributions provide insights that will generate significant discussion about the policies necessary to sustain the vitality and integrity of the university education-sports coalition.

• A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015 • “A penetrating examination of how the elite college football programs have become ‘giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side.’”—Mark Kram, The New York Times Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a riveting and sometimes shocking look inside the money culture of college football and how it has come to dominate a surprising number of colleges and universities. Over the past decade college football has not only doubled in size, but its elite programs have become a $2.5-billion-a-year entertainment business, with lavishly paid coaches, lucrative television deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. Profit margins among the top football schools range from 60% to 75%—results that dwarf those of such high-profile companies as Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—yet thanks to the support of their football-mad representatives in Congress, teams aren’t required to pay taxes. In most cases, those windfalls are not passed on to the universities themselves, but flow directly back into their athletic departments. College presidents have been unwilling or powerless to stop a system that has spawned a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, and a growing cadre of bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play. From the University of Oregon’s lavish $42 million academic center for athletes to Alabama coach Nick Saban’s $7 million paycheck—ten times what the school pays its president, and 70 times what a full-time professor there earns—Gaul examines in depth the extraordinary financial model that supports college football and the effect it has had not only on other athletic programs but on academic ones as well. What are the consequences when college football coaches are the highest paid public employees in over half the states in an economically troubled country, or when football players at some schools receive ten times the amount of scholarship awards that academically gifted students do? Billion-Dollar Ball considers these and many other issues in a compelling account of how an astonishingly wealthy sports franchise has begun to reframe campus values and distort the fundamental academic mission of our universities.

Why do universities place so much emphasis on athletics? Are the salaries of head coaches excessive? Should student-athletes be paid? Why is there so much cheating in college sports? Should athletic departments be subsidized by the university? Does Title IX unfairly discriminate against men's sports? This textbook is designed to help teach students about the business of college sports, particularly the big-money sports of football and basketball, allowing them to answer these and other important questions. The book provides undergraduate students with the information and economic tools to analyze the behavior of the NCAA, athletic conferences, and individual colleges and universities in the market for college sports. Specific topics include the markets for athletes and coaches, the importance of athletics for colleges and universities, the finances of athletic departments, the influence of the media in commercializing college sports, issues of race and gender, and the possibilities for reforming college sports.

Operating behind a veil of amateurism, the NCAA and collegiate athletic departments oversee big business sports programs. These entities generate revenues comparable to professional sports, practice and play in facilities that rival those found in professional sports, and pay their top coaches salaries comparable to the salaries paid to coaches of professional sports teams. Athletes are courted with lavish stadiums, training facilities, and locker rooms. Customers are wooed with branded apparel, videos, logos, and advertisements. Business interests are captured with stadium billboards, electronic ads on scoreboards, sponsorship of bowl games, logos on uniforms, and exclusive apparel and equipment contracts. Where do, or should, these lucrative athletic ventures fit in the mission of higher education? To what extent is the central mission of creating an environment for learning and extending the frontiers of knowledge enhanced or limited by college sports? Are declarations by the NCAA to promote amateurism and competitive balance supportive of the university mission? Does the NCAA even follow its purported objectives? The Economics of College Sports contains both empirical and theoretical research to address these and related issues. Perhaps the most unique contributions focus on the interactions between legal and institutional aspects of the NCAA and their impact on the objectives and goals of university education; all of the contributions provide insights that will generate significant discussion about the policies necessary to sustain the vitality and integrity of the university education-sports coalition.

The sports industry provides a seemingly endless set of examples from every area of microeconomics, giving students the opportunity to study economics in a context that holds their interest. Thoroughly updated to reflect the current landscape, The Economics of Sports introduces core economic concepts and theories and applies them to US and international sports. Divided into five parts, the book focuses on three major areas of the economics of sports: industrial organization, public economics, and labor economics. Updates for this seventh edition include: • An entirely new chapter on sports gambling and a fully revised section on intercollegiate sports; • Updated material on social justice in sports and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the industry; • More coverage of international sports, e-sports, and new biographical sketches. This well-presented and accessible text is supported by easy-to-follow pedagogical features, such as end-of-chapter summaries and questions, and a companion website, which offers useful resources for students and instructors. It is the perfect textbook for intermediate and advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in sports economics.

How do we identify the impact of superstar players? Do referees display any bias? What has happened to competitive balance? Why do players move so freely in today's labour market? Do rule-changes influence behaviour? How effective are incentives in encouraging players to exert maximum effort? The data that professional sport generates, which is unparalleled in any other industry, provides a wealth of information to which economists can bring their analytic toolkit to answer these questions and to better understand the mechanics of professional sport. Advances in Sports Economics is a wide-ranging collection of newly commissioned essays that examines the multifaceted field of sports economics in baseball, basketball, cricket, football, Gaelic games, horse racing, rugby and tennis. Both at the professional and amateur level, sport offers economists the opportunity to study the behaviour, choices and outcomes of decisions of players and referees as well as regulators and governments. The contributors range across questions of incentives, rule changes, labour issues, competition structure, gambling, gender equality, match official behaviour and funding to explore the variety of applications that economic analysis can bring to the field.

“Sport has the power to change the world.” Sports Economics Uncut expresses this insight from Nelson Mandela, exploring sports as a fascinating mirror of the world and a powerful agent of change. In it, Brian Goff covers subjects ranging from the ebb and flow of racial discrimination, to inequality, law enforcement, managers and risky decisions, club membership, and politics. Much more than merely a review or synthesis, this book extends existing perspectives and explores provocative questions such as: how systematic is racial bias in pro sports today? Is all racial segregation in sports due to racial bias? How much are college athletes really worth, and is league parity really optimal?