Arms race escalates in major-college athletics
By Roy Ockert Jr.
Sept. 1, 2015
As the college football season kicks off this week, the arms race for athletic supremacy has escalated.
Two recent changes in National Collegiate Athletic Association rules have resulted in members providing some $160 million a year in additional benefits to major-college athletes, according to a USA Today survey.
This was inevitable following a vote by the NCAA Division I Board of Directors last year to give the nation’s five richest conferences autonomy, and it’s probably just the beginning. In January the NCAA convention voted to allow Division I institutions to cover athletes’ “cost of attendance.”
You might have thought most of the big schools were already doing that, what with all the full scholarships being available to athletes, especially in football and basketball. But you’d be wrong. Athletes also have incidental expenses such as transportation, snacks and laundry.
“Cost of attendance” is a nice way of saying that colleges and universities can now give their athletes a stipend for expenses beyond the normal costs of tuition, room and board, books and fees.
All college students have such expenses, and athletes are no exception. However, because of the coaches’ demands on their time and recruiting restrictions, they can’t earn spending money through part-time jobs like other students.
Vadal Alexander, an offensive lineman at LSU, told CBS Sports that he might use COA money to make a couple month’s payments on his car, buy some sneakers and get his mom something nice.
Alabama linebacker Reggie Ragland said he’d use the extra money to buy food, pay bills and maybe “get some clothes and shirts.”
Asked by USA Today what he’d do with his first $400 monthly allocation, Jalen Christian, a freshman wide receiver at South Carolina, said: “Save it up? I’m an Xbox guy, and there are new games coming out in October and November.”
COA stipends are a result of various pressures on the NCAA, including antitrust lawsuits, criticism from Congress about the treatment of athletes, huge increases in television rights revenues for the elite conferences, and skyrocketing costs for facilities and salaries for coaches, athletic directors, conference and NCAA executives.
Of course, once the elite athletic programs start offering more money to their athletes, other Division I schools will do their best to catch up, even if they can’t afford it. Non-football schools are focusing on basketball, but even Football Championship Series schools like Wichita State and Virginia Commonwealth are phasing in stipends.
The USA Today survey covered 100 of 128 Football Bowl Subdivision schools. CBS did a similar survey but received responses from only 82. Private universities don’t have to disclose their revenues and expenses. Those that did reported an average COA budget of $900,000 for 2015-16.
CBS gathered enough information to compile a detailed breakdown for every conference, showing a wide gap between the Power Five and the Group of Five, which consists of conferences for mid-majors like Arkansas State University.
ASU is one of only two schools in the Sun Belt Conference offering a COA stipend this year, the other being South Alabama. ASU reported estimated new costs of $816,000, funding a $4,000 stipend.
The Southeastern Conference, in which the University of Arkansas competes, has eight schools averaging more than $4,000 in COA stipends, ranging from $5,666 at Tennessee to $3,528 at Texas A&M. Arkansas has added $1.2 million to its budget for the scholarship increases, which will be about $4,500 per athlete.
Earlier this year Alabama head football coach Nick Saban was critical of the large discrepancies in the SEC. Alabama’s reported cost of attendance then indicated an athletic stipend of $3,463, which would have been at the bottom on the league.
“You can’t create a system that really can almost promote fraud,” Saban told Inside Higher Education. “Even in the NFL they have a salary cap. When we don’t have a cap that makes it equal for everybody, it really goes against everything we've tried to do in the NCAA that we’ve tried to do for parity.”
Soon afterward, the university increased its cost-of-attendance estimate, and Alabama can now offer one of the highest COA stipends in the country. Saban is no longer worried about fraud.
Apparently Alabama isn’t the only university that raised its cost-of-attendance estimate drastically. Georgia’s athletic stipends nearly doubled after the university adjusted its numbers, and Rutgers raised its stipends by $2,000 per athlete following a re-assessment.
“It’s suspicious,” said Ellen Frishberg, president of a higher education consulting firm. “Since you have to present the cost of attendance as the same to everyone, increasing it inflates the budgets for the entire population. That creates more financial need, which creates more loan eligibility ... They’re creating a huge amount of unmet need and funding it for some people and not for others.”
What a university reports as its cost of attendance helps determine how much aid a Pell Grant recipient is due and how much a student can borrow in federal loans.
Cost of attendance varies widely from one university to another, and those extra expenses may vary some from one place to another. But Saban was right: If there is no cap, this will get out of control quickly.
Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.