Amid a heavy financial crunch, Knight Commission report gives ADs, coaches much to ponder

Report points toward college financial crossroads

CORAL GABLES, Fla. — One of the first major decisions Kirby Hocutt made after becoming Miami’s athletic director last year was a round of departmental layoffs, moves that trimmed $1 million from his operating budget.

Unpopular moves, for certain, but ones he deemed essential.

“Has that alleviated future concerns? It’s helped,” Hocutt said. “But I wish I could sit here and tell you that things are great. They’re not.”

That’s a sentiment shared by many of his peers these days, especially after the Knight Commission released a survey this week saying that the overwhelming majority of college and university presidents believe the current business model for college sports isn’t sustainable without significant reforms.

That survey, which included input from 95 of the 119 presidents of Football Bowl Subdivision schools at the time (FBS has since grown to 120), also said the administrators themselves believe they’re largely powerless to make the necessary changes.

Enter the athletic directors, who hope they’re already knee-deep in that process.

“Maybe we can’t do business the way we’ve always done business,” said Dutch Baughman, the executive director of the Division 1-A Athletic Directors Association. “We want to take a leadership role in this, realizing we can’t do it by ourselves. We’re not saying to the presidents, ‘We agree with this great landscape you’ve painted. Now let us know when you decide how you want to go about this.’”

Baughman said the group of 120 athletic directors has already identified 25 ways colleges could improve their fiscal viability when it comes to sports. He’s taking seven of those to the NCAA for further discussion next month, and talks are under way with conference commissioners as well.

Some will likely be universally accepted, like eliminating foreign travel for teams. Others will likely create strong debate, like eliminating nontraditional sports seasons and reducing the number of regular-season contests, which likely would not include football.

But at least one idea from the AD association — eliminating off-campus stays by teams before home games, a common practice in football, where teams check into hotels to minimize distractions — is already proving to be an enormously unpopular notion, even with some athletic directors themselves.

“I think that’s a dumb proposal,” Texas Tech coach Mike Leach said. “And I mean that with the ultimate, utmost due respect.”

At Oklahoma State, coach Mike Gundy said the hotel-stays before game have been part of the football culture for as long as he can remember. Many schools negotiate a reasonable cost for the rooms, typically with two players in each, but others have said the hotel catering bill — dinner, snack, breakfast and lunch for 100 or so relatively large young men with larger appetites — makes it pricey.

“In order for it to change, there would certainly need to be good reason to change it,” Gundy said.

The Knight survey pointed to plenty of reasons for change.

In all, six of seven presidents who participated say they believe the salary structure for football and basketball coaches at FBS schools is out of whack and needs to be reined in. Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said salaries at his school for coaches in Olympic sports have tripled since 1994. And there’s been discussion about other changes, like not bringing nonrevenue teams to campus for training in the summer before schools open.

“We need to get to a place where the expenditures of intercollegiate athletics are proportionate to the expenditures at the rest of the university,” said William Kirwan, chancellor of the university system of Maryland and a Knight Commission co-chair. “We cannot live with the situation, in my opinion, where the rate of increase in intercollegiate athletics is four times that of the academic program.”

Hocutt has seen this from all sides.

He was a football player at Kansas State, a public university, and worked at Oklahoma — one of the nation’s richest, most successful athletic departments. From there, he was athletic director at a mid-major, Ohio University. And now he leads athletics at Miami, a private school that can’t spend like many of its biggest rivals.

“The only thing similar about the business models at those schools is we’re all serving young people who are doing incredible things, representing our institutions very well in competition and in the classroom,” Hocutt said. “But as far as the business models, they are all very, very different.”

___-

Associated Press Writer Betsy Blaney in Lubbock, Texas, contributed to this report.