Editorials

For all the passion it inspires among alumni and fans, college football is a multi-million dollar enterprise that often pays exorbitant salaries to its coaches and can turn a remarkable profit for a select few of the universities that field teams.

Thanks to “Field Gold,” the three-day series in The Star, we have a firm picture of the campus-wide effect a winning football program can have on universities. It can spur the nationwide recruitment of students, it can boost university donations, it can provide significant revenue from the sale of licensed merchandise, and it can pay the bills for all other sports within a university's athletics department.

Is Nick Saban worth nearly $4 million a year to the University of Alabama?

Yes, but only if his football team has success and spreads the wealth across the Tuscaloosa campus.

The degree of shared profits between football programs and their academic brethren is the resounding issue to be taken from the work of reporter Steve Ivey, who spent nearly a month researching information, interviewing university officials and traveling to campuses in three states. Ivey's reporting indicates that the academic side of universities can indeed reap tremendous dividends from high-profile football programs that make millions if the profits from football are spread around campus.

The examples are striking. The University of Florida, whose academic requirements are among the most stringent of the 12 Southeastern Conference schools, holds the national championship in football and men's basketball and has won the SEC's all-sports trophy 16 of the last 19 years. Fueled by the national exposure of its sports teams, Florida already has received more than 25,000 student applications this year; that's more than the current enrollment at Alabama.

U.S. News and World Report's influential rankings have Florida as the nation's 13th-best public university, making it the highest-rated public school in the SEC.

And the money?

Florida's athletics department gave $2.5 million to the university last year to use as it pleased; its university leadership on both sides of the academic and athletic divide seems committed to the sharing of athletics' profits. The proof, they say, is in the pudding.

Critics of Saban-sized coaching contracts point to the issue of a university's priorities, and rightly so. By definition, universities exist to teach; football is an extracurricular activity that can make a campus come alive on fall Saturdays, resplendent with marching bands and returning alumni and seas of tailgating fans.

But The Star's series has proven that Saban-sized contracts can bring universities undeniable benefits — added revenue, added exposure, added students — if the money is shared across campus. At Florida and schools like Ohio State, Texas and LSU, athletics departments make sizeable donations to academics. They're doing it right. Michigan, meanwhile, is not. Last year its athletics department made $17 million in profit, but none of that was donated to academic programs.

That's wrong.

University leadership should require, without exception, that profitable athletics departments donate to the schools that house them. Sports should not be a separate entity on college campuses. The quality of the education at America's public universities is critical to the nation's future, and the sharing of immense profits turned by successful football teams is not only proper, it's necessary.