Come Early. Be Loud. Cash In.
In the arms race to build the fanciest stadiums, hire the best coaches, and attract the top athletes, the University of Texas is unrivaled: Its athletics program is the most profitable—and most successful—of any school in history. How did the Horns climb to the top? By inventing the rules that everyone else now plays by.
Photograph by Van Ditthavong
“More than anything else, I am at a point in my life when I want this place packed,” said University of Texas football coach Mack Brown one day this spring, gazing out the window of his office behind the hulking Godzillatron at Darrell K Royal—Texas Memorial Stadium. He was looking north toward the enormous, crane-shadowed renovation project that was transforming the section behind the end zone. “I want the fans having fun,” he continued. “I want them wearing orange. And I don’t want it to be just a football game. I want it to be something you do if you are in the state of Texas on Saturday. You make time in your schedule for it, and you plan weddings and anniversaries around it. Because this is Texas football.”
Indeed it is. Such a project might have been done more modestly at other schools, making changes at a moderate rate and keeping costs to reasonable levels. But this is the University of Texas at Austin, where tastes run more to the colossal, the gargantuan, the magnificent, and the unabashedly Roman. Where football, as Brown said, is something you put off weddings for. So there is nothing modest about the North End Zone project, or the NEZ, as it is known, a gleaming $176.5 million makeover that was completed this summer and includes a new upper deck, 47 luxury suites, an exclusive club level with 2,200 premium seats, and an enclosed bar and buffet area. It increases the stadium’s capacity from 81,000 to 94,113. Those ancient, familiar concrete arches at the north end of the stadium have been replaced by an 850,000-square-foot complex—the equivalent of a forty-story skyscraper. Inside is a student center, an 18,000-square-foot study hall for athletes, room for four gymnasiums, and acres of unfinished office space.
With its massive laid-brick turrets and cantilevered deck, the NEZ has transformed Royal-Memorial from what was merely a first-class arena into arguably the finest football facility in the country. It also represents the crown jewel of a decade-long construction spree that has cost $348 million and rebuilt or refurbished most of the university’s sports venues. If that seems like a lot of money, then consider this: When Brown was hired, in 1997, the budget for UT’s sports program was $21.4 million. This year the figure is expected to hit $126.8 million, the largest of any university in the nation.
Money on that scale does not just happen by accident. It seeks, and follows, victory. These infusions of cash have accompanied one of the most triumphant eras in the history of collegiate sports. Since the inception of the Big 12, in 1996, UT’s men’s and women’s teams have each won 37 conference championships and 6 national titles. In 2005 and 2006, the nine men’s teams won 7 Big 12 titles and 2 national championships (in football and baseball). The football team is the only one in the NCAA to have won at least ten games for seven consecutive years. In the Directors’ Cup, which measures the overall success of a college’s athletics program, UT has finished in the top ten for seven consecutive seasons. In a 2002 cover story, Sports Illustrated named Texas as America’s number one sports university—before its phenomenal run of conference and national championships. Any way you look at it, the twenty men’s and women’s teams at the University of Texas are in the midst of a renaissance.
That doesn’t mean, however, that everyone approves of the philosophy of the athletics program. A lot of people hate the idea, in fact. They believe that UT’s unblushing commercialism and its dogged pursuit of profit represent much of what is wrong with intercollegiate sports in America. The critics’ contention—supported by no shortage of examples—is that big-time college athletics has evolved into a hypercompetitive, semiprofessional arms race in which schools spend themselves into insolvency by building extravagant facilities and paying outlandish salaries to coaches.
The most persistent critic of the system has been the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a blue-ribbon panel of university presidents, officials, and other professionals that has studied the issue for two decades. Its landmark reports express the unalloyed conviction that college sports has been corrupted by money and has come to “more closely resemble the commercialized model appropriate to professional sports than . . . the academic model.” The victims in the commission’s findings are traditional academic values and, inevitably, the student-athletes, who receive a substandard education.
By the Knight Commission’s key measures, the University of Texas would be a leading offender. Its sports program is the most commercialized of any school, partly because it pioneered the concept. It pays its coaches, assistant coaches, and trainers more than just about any other school. It has spent huge amounts of money on facilities. The budget of its athletics department stands entirely separate from the university’s, freeing it, for example, to pay its thirty-year-old running backs coach $250,000 a year, untrammeled by an academic pay scale in which a full professor makes half that amount. While UT has suffered no major academic or recruiting scandals, the commission insists that the very presence of big money and corporate sponsorships means misplaced priorities. Those views are shared by many critics of college sports and by some of UT’s own faculty.
That hasn’t stopped UT from building what amounts to a colossal cash machine, whose success on the field is increasingly defined by its aggressive, market-oriented business plan. If you divide UT’s total sports budget by the number of athletes, the per-athlete figure is $170,000. No other college in America comes close to that amount. It leads one to wonder: Where, exactly, does all that money come from?
It was not always like this, of course. UT did not always win all the time or have the best facilities. There were years when the football team experienced the existential horror of successive losing seasons. There were long stretches when the basketball team couldn’t have found the top 25 with a high-resolution GPS. Today’s sleek, dazzlingly efficient program is really only a decade old. And ironically, it is the product of a sweeping financial crisis in American college sports that has gutted many of the country’s most hallowed universities.
The crisis started with a law known as Title IX, which has turned the world of scholastic sports upside down. Passed by Congress in 1972, it ultimately required that women be given equal opportunities to participate in school sports, a change that happened only gradually over the following three decades. No institution was more deeply involved in this process than the University of Texas. But in 1992 a group of female students sued the university under Title IX. They wanted more teams for women to roughly equalize the number of male and female athletes on campus. The key word was “equalize.”
The lawsuit was immediately seen as a groundbreaking case. That was because no school had done more for women’s athletics than UT. In 1975 the university had started a women’s program and put considerable resources into it. Building on the success of coach Jody Conradt’s powerhouse basketball teams, UT women won a stunning seventeen national championships in five sports in the eighties. In spite of that, the university had remained out of compliance with Title IX, as had most schools across the country. The large number of football players—130 or more at UT—created an imbalance with the numbers of players on the smaller women’s teams. Instead of fighting the lawsuit, the university settled it, in 1993, by agreeing to start three new women’s teams: soccer, softball, and rowing. That sent shock waves across the nation: If UT could be forced to change, then everyone could. “The athletic world was watching,” said Conradt, who also served as the women’s athletics director from 1992 to 2001 and retired as head coach in 2007. “It had a major national impact, and other schools were waiting to see how the University of Texas would respond.” They soon started to follow UT’s model.
That model, unfortunately, was brutally expensive. In an era of tightening budgets and spiraling expenses, schools were now going to have to pay for lots of new programs. (In UT’s case, start-up costs for the three new teams alone would exceed $3 million.) But how? The main source of athletics dollars, especially at larger universities, is football. With rare exceptions, it is the only collegiate sport that makes money. Football funds the other sports, and shortfalls are made up by endowments or, in most cases, allocations from the academic side of the university. But by the nineties, such transfers were becoming less and less popular. Presidents of cash-starved universities—including UT’s—began to insist that athletics pay its own way. The problem, as everyone soon discovered, was that there was only so much revenue that could be squeezed out of a football team.
For many schools, that meant a cruel, zero-sum game. Adding women’s teams meant killing off men’s teams, often with bitter repercussions. According to an NCAA study, between 1988 and 2006 the number of men’s teams at Division I schools dropped by 245, while the number of women’s teams rose by 703. Across all three main NCAA divisions, a staggering 2,237 women’s teams were added. During that same time period, in Division I, 58 men’s swimming and diving teams, 54 men’s tennis teams, and 51 wrestling teams were scrapped.
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Texas Our Texas says: This article says "... UT has suffered no major academic or recruiting scandals ... ." However: Longhorns Baseball suffered NCAA probation (two years; announced November 2002) and sanctions for a recruiting violation determined by the NCAA to be major: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/baseball/2002-11-06-texas-probation_x.htm Longhorns Football suffered NCAA probation (two years; announced June 1987) and sanctions for rules violations: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE7D9133BF93BA25755C0A961948260 Maybe the baseball sanction isn't considered major despite the NCAA's labeling it major? And maybe the football troubles are considered too long ago (although during Mr. Dodds' tenure)? These NCAA actions are mentioned for fact accuracy only, and not to diminish in any way the revenue growth and athletic win-loss success Mr. Dodds has stewarded. Thank you, TM and S.C. Gwynne, for an in-depth, informative article on a key aspect of an important Texas institution. (December 22nd, 2008 at 3:55pm)
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