Women’s College Basketball Loses Money, Sucks
From SbB, I have learned that NCAA Women’s hoops is losing a lot of money.
The US Department of Education reported that the NCAA’s 333 Division I women’s basketball programs that competed in the 2005-2006 season lost a cumulative amount of ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-NINE MMMILLION DOLLARS!
This may not mean all that much to you, but if you realized where this money was coming from, you would likely be a bit irked. A few years ago, I was looking at a list of revenues from college sports programs (mainly focusing at the University of Miami, where I was an undergraduate student at the time), and the NCAA rules of disbursing money relatively evenly among different athletic programs is astonishing. Although the football team literally earned 1,000 times the revenue of a program like women’s basketball, the girls still received a ton of cheddar, which was essentially money pissed away, except for the girls on scholarship and anyone else who happens to profit from the program. I would say that I’m a general fan of capitalism, so it makes no sense to me that the programs who earn all the money can’t spend a greater majority of that money. I don’t think you can leave the less cared about programs out of it, but a mere trickle down is plenty for them.
on March 5th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
You make a good point, but consider this: If athletic teams had to fully support themselves, then most Division I schools would have a football team, a men’s basketball team, and nothing else. Even allowing for a “trickle down,” as you put it, would not account for the huge expenses required to run some of these teams, paying for equipment, training and medical expenses, tuition for athletes, and travel. This is actually one of the few things the NCAA does right, in my opinion, allowing athletic departments to spread the wealth in a way that allows for a good amount of athletes to earn athletic scholarships.