About FGCU (and some bad analysis)

Deadspin has a fairly interesting article up today about Florida Gulf Coast University, this year's surprise entrant into the NCAA Tournament's Sweet Sixteen. Touching on some topics that I've previously discussed in posts here and here, author Jonathan Mahler puts a different spin on this Cinderella story.

Don’t waste your time wooing Nobel laureates to your faculty or trying to recruit National Merit Scholars to a college they’ve never heard of. Do what any self-respecting entrepreneur would do: Devote your resources to building a first-class Division I basketball program.

It’s not going to happen overnight, but FGCU pulled it off pretty quickly... The Eagles basketball program started in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and had to apply more than once before being accepted into the National Collegiate Athletic Association—at the Division II level. Even after being granted permission to move up to Division I, the team had to wait three years before becoming eligible for postseason play.

Florida Gulf Coast University won its first NCAA tournament game in the school’s second year of eligibility, a mere 16 years after graduating its first student. Harvard won its first tournament game this year, too—371 years after its first commencement...

Just how valuable is a strong showing in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament? As it happens, Butler, whose improbable run to the 2010 Final Four is still the stuff of legend, has studied this very question. Its near-championship run—it lost in the finals to Duke—generated precisely $639,273,881.82 in publicity for the university. That’s to say nothing of the increases in merchandise sales and charitable giving, or the 41 percent surge in applications.

Interesting stuff, although as I've pointed out in my previous posts, not all schools are as successful at this game as FGCU has been—many more have thrown untold millions at their athletic departments and had hardly any success at all on the field or as an institution. On balance, it's pretty much a zero-sum game—some win big, but many others lose just as much.

Of course, where the author really lost me wasn't in this conclusion, but in his odd insistence that this Cinderella run somehow should have been foreseen by all of us, or that it was somehow inevitable. Mahler writes:

[Head coach Andy] Enfield hasn’t exactly had to scrounge for talent at FGCU. His team’s point guard, Brett Comer, grew up playing youth basketball with Austin Rivers, a current starter for the New Orleans Hornets and the son of former NBA star Doc Rivers. The father of one of Enfield’s bench players, Filip Cvjeticanin, played alongside Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic on the Yugoslavian national team that won a silver medal in the 1988 Olympics.

These are some pretty tenuous links here, my man. I, for example, grew up playing baseball against this guy, in games umpired by this guy, and I coached this guy at a baseball camp when I was in high school. My father, meanwhile, shared a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1983, when I was two years old.

Do these connections alone make me a top-tier athletic talent, or a budding superstar journalist? Of course not. All they do is illustrate what we already know about the world, which is that it can be a pretty small place sometimes. If you play sports for long enough, you're pretty much guaranteed to line up with or against somebody who's pretty talented—and if not, you've probably got a relative who did (hey, come to think of it, my uncle did play hoops against Patrick Ewing in the Boston city championship way back when... maybe I've got more of a future in basketball than I'd realized).

As for FGCU, if they had really figured out a way to somehow magically attract top athletes to their school, they wouldn't have been recruiting kids who "grew up playing youth basketball with Austin Rivers", they'd have been recruiting Austin Rivers himself. This isn't to say that these FGCU kids aren't talented—in fact, they are. I've been amazed by what these guys have done, and it's no fluke. I can't wait to watch them continue their run tomorrow night against Florida (late game, eh, CBS? I see what you did there...), and I hope they take this thing all the way to Atlanta for the Final Four.

But to pretend as though FGCU was some sleeping giant—with tons of top talent that nobody bothered to talk about—obscures the real lessons that we could be learning here. Namely, that a coach and a team playing incredibly well as a unit while having fun and playing with reckless abandon can do some pretty special things on a basketball court (and that the NCAA probably screwed up a bit with this year's seeding of the tournament). Not to mention, this isn't exactly a unique story in recent years—George Mason, VCU, and Butler all preceded (and exceeded) FGCU in this regard. Sure, FGCU reaching the Final Four would be unbelievable, and I'm certainly rooting for it, but we're not there yet.

When a big sports story like this one comes along, a lot of bad journalism is bound to be written, so this particular article is hardly a surprise. I just wish that, for once, we could all just enjoy an awesome story on its own merits, without having to draw some bigger (nonsensical) lesson about it all. Unfortunately, that's just not what we in the internet age like to do.

[Deadspin]

The tail is still wagging the dog at UF

Well, this is a fun one. I've written a couple of times before about the role of athletics at our nation's universities, and whether the tail may be wagging the dog. On both occasions, I discussed the University of Florida, which has been one of the more aggressive institutions in terms of spending on athletics while making cuts elsewhere (like, in academics).

UF clearly believes in the "front porch" theory of running an academic institution, which I've discussed (and partially debunked) in my previous posts. But even for them, this most recent decision is a head-scratcher, and makes one wonder just what the hell the senior administration at UF is thinking.

The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.4 million.  The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments. 

Let’s get this straight: in the midst of a technology revolution, with a shortage of engineers and computer scientists, UF decides to cut computer science completely?... 

Meanwhile, the athletic budget for the current year is $97.7 million, an increase of more than $2 million from last year.  The increase alone would offset the savings supposedly gained by cutting computer science.

Yeesh. Ironically, Florida Governor Rick Scott just last week approved the creation of a brand new state college, Florida Polytechnic University, specifically to address the state's significant shortage of qualified workers in the so-called "STEM" fields (science, technology, engineering, and math).

Perhaps UF's cutting of the computer science department was done as part of a broader re-allocation of resources within the state's education system, perhaps not. Either way, something doesn't smell quite right here--why spend millions to create an entire new college when you can just keep (or expand on) what you've already got? It makes little to no sense to slash this department entirely (especially a department that caters to a growing industry) while plowing even more money into athletics, and the indignation throughout the blogosphere is entirely warranted. What is going on here?

[Forbes]

An update on the tail wagging the dog

Two recent developments in the world of collegiate athletics have cast a new light on the "front porch" theory of big-time sports, which I first wrote about several months ago, and I felt compelled to write this post as an update. As a reminder,

At the University of Florida, one of the largest and most successful programs, spending on athletics increased 6% last year even while the university was forced to slash budgets elsewhere--a total of 139 faculty and staff members have been laid off since 2007.

The reason, university officials say, is that the emphasis on sports pays off: athletics serve as the “front porch” of a university, a powerful marketing tool that generates free advertising on ESPN and the sports pages.

But economists have found it difficult to quantify a link between investing in a high-profile athletic program and reaping presumed benefits, like alumni donations or higher application rates. “If there’s any effect, it’s a blip: it doesn’t persist,” said Jonathan Orszag, an economist who has evaluated such issues for the NCAA.

I'd be interested to see more research on this effect, since I've seen anecdotal evidence on both sides. Schools like Boston College, Virginia Tech, and Southern Cal saw their national profile--and USNews rankings--skyrocket after their football teams became successful. But other schools--Oregon State and Oklahoma State immediately come to mind--have invested massively in athletics but not seen the commensurate bump in rankings.

Regardless of Mr. Orszag's skepticism, schools like the University of Florida have continued to invest massively in their bigger sports, and recent reports have indicated that they've been willing to make other compromises as well in order to ensure athletic prowess. USA Today (and HBO Sports) noted that Florida football players had been arrested more than 30 times during head coach Urban Meyer's tenure, an eye-popping statistic that cast doubt on whether Florida was looking the other way on the caliber of person it was admitting to its program. For many, it was an indication of a win-at-all-costs mentality that was endorsed and condoned at the highest levels of university management.

That dynamic was further investigated by a Sports Illustrated/CBS News report last week, which indicated that the problem was incredibly widespread.

The number of players with criminal histories turned up by the SI/CBS News investigation reinforces a pervasive assumption that college coaches are willing to recruit players with questionable pasts to win. More surprising, however, is just how little digging college coaches do into players' backgrounds before offering them a scholarship.

Among the 25 schools in the investigation, only two -- TCU and Oklahoma -- perform any type of regular criminal background searches on recruits. But even TCU and Oklahoma don't look at juvenile records. No school does, even though football and basketball players are among the most high-profile representatives of a university. (Of the 25 schools, only Virginia Tech did any type of background checks on admitted students, and admissions questionnaires at more than half the other universities ask applicants if they have ever been arrested.)

No sooner had this report been published than a strikingly different story hit the news wires--BYU's basketball team, newly rewarded with a top 5 ranking, made headlines by kicking starting forward Brandon Davies off the team for an honor code violation. His violation? Nothing criminal or arrestable--he violated the university's strict religion-based code by engaging in premarital sex with his girlfriend.

At first glance, this seemed like a dramatic and troubling double standard--students at other schools were getting away with criminal behavior, but Davies was booted for doing something that is considered standard behavior on most college campuses. BYU drew the ire of many in the collegiate sports community, including Amare Stoudemire and none other than former Florida quarterback Tim Tebow.

But the more I thought about the situation, the more I determined that the differing decisions made by schools like Florida (to look the other way) and BYU (to be firm and harsh) were in fact quite compatible when viewed through the lens of the "front porch" theory.

For both schools, athletics are an incredibly visible marketing tool for the underlying institution. There's no easier way to send a message to prospective applicants than via the much-hyped, much-analyzed, heavily-covered world of sports. Florida uses this platform to display its unwavering commitment to excellence; BYU, on the other hand, chose in this instance to use it to display its commitment to moral righteousness and chastity.

Ultimately, the decision on how best to use the platform of sports presents a difficult line for any institution to toe. Some level of winning and competitiveness is seemingly necessary in order to maintain credibility among a sometimes fickle group of applicants (and donors), but going too far down that line can compromise the overall goals and mission of the broader institution to the point that it in fact loses that same credibility. What is undeniable is that the sports platform is an extremely powerful medium via which to communicate with the public--it's up to the individual institution to decide what message it wishes to convey.

Unfortunately, in many situations, the student-athlete can easily end up becoming little more than an advertising tool. In this case, Brandon Davies got caught on the wrong side of the message, whereas many Florida Gators have luckily found themselves on the right side of the message. It's somewhat sad for the athletes to be continually caught in the middle like this, but it would behoove all athletes and fans to recognize collegiate athletics for what they are, and realize the implications on athletes everywhere. It's just not about them.

[SI.com]

Is the tail wagging the dog at our nation's universities?

I've always been conflicted about the role of athletics at major universities. As a former athlete myself, I not only love watching college sports but also constantly argue in favor of their developmental capabilities. I believe that sports--both individual and team--develop traits that are both incredibly important and difficult to cultivate elsewhere.

But at the same time, my experience working in a collegiate athletic department exposed me to the massive world of big business that has developed around these programs, which was unsettling to say the least. I've long wondered if the explosion in revenues and attention paid to these programs was beneficial to the universities' core mission over the long term, and I believe that it remains an open question. I was glad, then, to see this article in the New York Times yesterday, focusing on the recent trend of major money flows to non-revenue generating sports.

All but 14 of the 120 athletic programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision — the highest level of college sports — lost money in the 2008-9 academic year, down from 25 profitable programs the year before, according to the NCAA.

Still, overall spending on sports has increased among universities with big-time programs, according to the NCAA. In 2008-9, athletic programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision increased their spending by nearly 11 percent over the previous year. At the same time, universities also increased their contribution to athletics, by 28 percent. That spending came even as the economic recession forced institutions to make painful cuts.

At the University of Florida, one of the largest and most successful programs, spending on athletics increased 6% last year even while the university was forced to slash budgets elsewhere--a total of 139 faculty and staff members have been laid off since 2007.

The reason, university officials say, is that the emphasis on sports pays off: athletics serve as the “front porch” of a university, a powerful marketing tool that generates free advertising on ESPN and the sports pages.

But economists have found it difficult to quantify a link between investing in a high-profile athletic program and reaping presumed benefits, like alumni donations or higher application rates. “If there’s any effect, it’s a blip: it doesn’t persist,” said Jonathan Orszag, an economist who has evaluated such issues for the NCAA.

I'd be interested to see more research on this effect, since I've seen anecdotal evidence on both sides. Schools like Boston College, Virginia Tech, and Southern Cal saw their national profile--and USNews rankings--skyrocket after their football teams became successful. But other schools--Oregon State and Oklahoma State immediately come to mind--have invested massively in athletics but not seen the commensurate bump in rankings.

I think this perceived "front porch" impact is even more questionable when it comes to investing in smaller sports, as the Times article mentions. Sports like field hockey and rowing rarely receive any national interest, so it would be hard to justify the increased expenditures in chasing championships there.

To be fair, many (or most) of these athletic programs are funded primarily by their own external foundations. Large donors give money not to the school, but directly to the athletic program foundations, in order to support both scholarship money and the building of new facilities. So perhaps the fault--if there is fault to be found--is with the donors themselves for prioritizing athletics over academics and research. They choose to support athletics in droves, and that is certainly their right. Perhaps time will tell if they are in fact doing what is best for their alma maters, or not.

[New York Times]