Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 9, 1994                   TAG: 9402160009
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: THOMAS O'BRIEN MICHAEL EDWARDS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

COLLEGE DRAIN

College sports should be for, and about, the student athletes above all. Too much of the money goes to sustain huge coaching staffs and extravagant new facilities, and big-time sports constitutes a big financial drain on American colleges and universities.

Most sports fans are not aware that it's a cruel delusion to believe that big-time sports brings big money to colleges. For example, recent data show that the NCAA member institutions ran an aggregate $300 million deficit on sports.

Recent statistics show that 93 percent of NCAA schools had deficits in their football programs. In Division l-A, the epitome of big "successful" athletics programs, 45 percent of schools ran deficits that averaged $638,000 per year. In Division l-AA, 94 percent of schools ran deficits averaging $535,000 each year. Even 34 percent of Division l-A basketball programs lost an average of $250,000, and other Division I men's basketball programs averaged deficits of about $200,000 each year. Indeed, analyst Murray Sperber has written that commonly used creative accounting methods mean that this is actually a big underestimate of the true financial drain.

Colleges argue that there isn't enough money to go around to enable women to have equal scholarship opportunities. Money is said to be too tight to provide young women the crucial support needed to nourish the growth and development of women's sports opportunities.

Is college sports supposed to be devoted to student athletes or to the huge coaching staffs? Personnel is the No. 1 cost of these programs. For example, in 1992-93, the University of Virginia paid nine assistant football coaches, each of whom received salaries of $54,500 to $85,900. Just one of these salaries could provide a wealth of new women's athletic scholarships. Cutting five assistant coaches could raise more than $250,000 in women's scholarships.

These figures for UVa are not marks of excess; the university is by all accounts a model program where the students really are required to be strong students.

Men's basketball programs in Division l-A allow a head coach, two full-time assistant coaches and one part-time coach - four paid coaches for only 15 student-athletes. The NCAA doesn't need to cut student scholarships for men's basketball; it should cut men's basketball assistant coaches.

We do not propose unilateral disarmament; if all college football teams had "only" five full-time, year-round assistant coaches, there still would be a level playing field.

So why all the recent talk about cutting sports teams to establish gender equity? Why reduce scholarship opportunities for students at all when huge coaching staffs eat so much of our universities' money?

College presidents and faculty representatives need to assert control over the endeavor, cut the huge "win at any cost" enterprise, and use the savings to provide equal scholarship opportunities for young women and more generous support to all of our scholarship students, even perhaps to nonathletes.

\ Thomas 0'Brien is director for research at Horizon Institute for Policy Solutions in Charlottesville, and Michael Edwards is a researcher at the institute.