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.
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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Whether this sort of expenditure is a gratuitous luxury or simply what top teams need to spend to stay competitive is a matter of debate. While UT’s costs are not out of line with its top competitors—Dodds and his chief financial officer, Ed Goble, are constantly benchmarking the UT program against the likes of Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Ohio State—they are considerably higher than those at weaker conference schools, like Baylor. When asked if he thought his athletics programs were guilty of extravagance in salaries, facilities, and other perks, University of Texas president Bill Powers defended the expenditures. “The arms race is going on across the country in all competitions for talent, in the law school or the history department as much as in the athletics department,” he said. “The main thing we want to do is make sure that whatever we are spending our money on is really helping our competitiveness and not just feathering the life of somebody who is already here. What are the extravagances? Locker rooms, weight rooms, places where you watch film? These are good investments in recruiting the kinds of kids we want. Also, some of the things we spend money on that might look extravagant are really just supervisory. Like the hotel for the football team Friday night. The bus across campus is really just a supervisory thing, getting them there safely, not having people after them for autographs. If you are talking about salaries, I think it is penny-wise and pound-foolish not to get the right people here. I have the same view of deans and faculty. The worst thing we can do is try to save six hundred thousand dollars on the football coach’s salary and not get the right person.”
One area where the Longhorns really do spend more than anyone falls under the nondescript title of “student services.” It is in many ways the ultimate key to the success of Dodds’s plan and, dollar for dollar, perhaps the most productive use of UT’s sports money. The name refers to the army of more than two hundred academic counselors, mentors, and tutors who surround athletes from the time they are recruited until they graduate, helping them plan their studies, buy their books, secure their housing, deal with their professors, and ultimately choose their careers. All big-time sports schools do this, but no one does it as thoroughly or throws as many resources at it—more than $2 million a year—as the University of Texas. This is partly because it can afford to, but also because UT’s student-athletes have a problem that most of their peers do not face. UT is a top-rated school: U.S. News & World Report’s 2009 list ranked it 15th out of the top 68 public universities. There are no special majors for athletes; no refuges in “independent studies,” as there have been at Auburn University or the University of Michigan; no courses in basket weaving, advanced slow-pitch softball, or, as was offered at the University of Georgia, Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball, which required taking only one 20-question test that included the following multiple-choice question: “How many points is a three-pointer worth?”
Into this environment come the top athletes in the nation. In many cases—such as swimming and track—they are the best athletes in the world, with year-round training regimens. Thus the twain: challenging academics and a brutally demanding sport. Combine that with SAT scores for student-athletes that are on average about 150 points below the nonathletes’, and you have an acute need for academic counseling, supervised study halls, and constant attention to the details of athletes’ lives. That is not to suggest that UT athletes are stupid. On average only an extremely small percentage of them—probably less than 2 percent—can’t cut it. But the stark, central fact of their lives is that they train forty hours or more a week. Give most college kids a physically exhausting forty-hour-a-week job to go along with four or five courses per semester plus summer school, and they would almost certainly need help too.
That help, coordinated by fifteen full-time counselors who marshal a battalion of mentors and tutors, is astonishingly thorough. When they first arrive on campus, athletes have special orientation meetings and get help choosing courses. Various mentors make sure they get the right housing. They take the athletes to the bookstore and on walks through campus to find their classrooms. All athletes are required to attend daily study halls in either Bellmont Hall or, in the case of football players, in the Moncrief--Neuhaus Athletic Center. They have supervised study halls and proctored tests when their teams are on the road, administered by counselors who travel with the teams. They each receive an average of 110 hours of tutoring per year from individuals assigned specifically to work with the athletics department. And as they near graduation, they get career counseling tailored for them.
“We are not just about academics,” said Randa Ryan, a 25-year veteran of UT athletics who oversees student services for all men’s and women’s sports except football, which is handled by longtime Brown assistant Brian Davis. “We are everything that has to do with the care and feeding of an elite athlete. Housing runs through our office. We work closely with sports medicine. We handle all personal-development issues, careers. We are trying to make sure student-athletes get a full collegiate experience. We are trying to make sure that they are actually very connected across campus with their advisers and their professors.”
Ryan and Davis have produced solid results. Widely circulated NCAA data two years ago showing abysmal graduation rates for UT athletes (last in the Big 12) were simply inaccurate, skewed by a now abandoned system that penalized schools when athletes in good academic standing left or transferred. In fact, UT’s athletes hold their own in spite of the school’s difficult academics. Eighty-eight percent of all Longhorns athletes who complete their NCAA eligibility graduate. That compares with a campus-wide rate of about 75 percent. In the new Academic Progress Rating system, which tracks student-athletes’ progress toward graduation, UT has performed well, if not exceptionally. For the 2006—2007 academic year, its football team led the Big 12, with forty players earning 3.0 averages or better. Its men’s basketball team, which has shown steady improvement over the past four years, had a perfect score this year, meaning that all of its players remained eligible and on track to graduate. (The team as a whole had a 3.3 GPA.)
“They have done a great job of helping me,” said senior wide receiver Quan Cosby, who carries a GPA somewhere between 3.5 and 3.75 and will graduate in three and a half years. “They sit down with you and see if you need tutoring. They may sit down with you and a professor. They get constant progress reports from the professors.”
Yet not everyone likes the counselor-tutor-mentor system that surrounds the student-athlete. “There is no question that the focus of an athlete in a major sport is athletics,” Granof said. “Most of them do not get an education in the way that you and I might think of an education. They might pass their courses and they might get a degree, and the counseling services are excellent. But is it an education when you are meeting every day with your tutor? Going over material with your tutor? Having the tutor help you write papers?”
Classics professor Tom Palaima, another persistent critic of the system, agrees. “They clearly live in a separate universe,” he said. “Yes, athletes take campus courses. But being surrounded by academic counselors, tutors, and course planners is not the nature of a university education. My own feeling is that it is, to use a strong word, a travesty. To use a weaker word, it is simply a kind of shadow of what a real education should be. The major thing you learn between ages eighteen and twenty-two at a university is how to control your own life. I don’t think that is happening for student-athletes, and in my opinion the cocoon they are in is not devised ultimately for their well-being. It’s there so the sports department can satisfy the NCAA requirements.”
From Dodds’s perspective, sentiments such as those expressed by Granof and Palaima may be his last big challenge. He is comfortably entrenched inside the sports machine he has built over the past 27 years. Most of his teams are riding high. With incentives, he is making more than $700,000 a year, a nifty upgrade from the $68,000 he was paid when he started, in 1981. His colleague Chris Plonsky is considered one of the most influential figures in women’s sports. Ed Goble, his CFO, is among the best in the business. The athletics department has more money than any school in history. He likes his four-mile walks in the morning, his wine collection, and his golf games, especially those he plays with his grandson, who is a sophomore on the UT golf team.
The only thing that has escaped him, perhaps, is the full and unqualified adulation of the faculty. But, in true Dodds fashion, he is quietly working on it. Traditionally athletics has been kept separate from academics. “You are told as a young coach, ‘Do not go talking to professors, because they are going to perceive it as pressure that you might be trying to get them to change a grade for a football player,’ ” Brown said. “So my little world was, ‘Keep your mouth shut and coach football.’ You have an academic staff that deals with faculty. You deal with football.”
But five years ago Dodds started to change that. He became the first athletics director to make a budget presentation to the faculty council, the body that evaluates all curricular changes and degree programs. In the past two years, he has made an unprecedented transfer of $5.6 million from his athletics department to the president’s office. (Until 2000, the academic side was still providing a $500,000 subsidy for the women’s program.) Last year the unimaginable happened: Brown appeared at the faculty council and gave a lengthy presentation on the team. No coach from any sport had ever set foot inside that room. “I have learned that it is important for me to be involved with the academic side of campus in any way I can,” Brown said.
Other bridges are being built. For the past three years, the football players have had a spring scrimmage where they invite their favorite faculty members to watch. Afterward they all share a meal. There is an annual “major exploration” night, in which freshmen invite faculty in a field they want to pursue to dinner. And Brown often asks faculty members to games: They travel with the team, eat with the players, and hang out in the locker rooms.
But the best example of Dodds’s rapprochement with the academic folks was the announcement in May of the establishment of the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs, at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Nothing even remotely like this has ever been done before at UT, and there is only one other endowed chair named after a coach in the country: the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, at Ohio State. The position will carry a $2 million endowment, the first $500,000 of which is put up by the athletics department as part of a $2.65 million gift made to the university for academic programs. It leads one to wonder if the D. DeLoss Dodds Chair in Comparative Linguistics won’t soon follow.
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