Football, football, football.
At Kansas University, football is like the weather. Everybody talks about it, but no one can do anything about it.
For example, at Sunday’s Kansas University Athletics Corp. board meeting, faculty member Wayne Osness uttered the three most frustrating words on Mount Oread.
“What about football?” Osness said.
Osness, a long-time HPER prof, had just heard KU athletics director Bob Frederick paint such a dismal picture of future finances that he, too, had given his stamp of approval to cutting men’s swimming and tennis and extracting another pound of flesh from KU men’s basketball patrons.
What about football indeed?
“We are in the process of developing a strategic plan to make football more competitive,” Frederick said. “We’ll talk about that before spring practice. It’s the key to our future because it’s a revenue string we can expand.”
Strategic plan? For football? At Kansas University?
That’s sort of like having a strategic plan for opening a two-liter bottle of soda when everybody knows all you have to do is twist the cap.
Just win, baby.
Kansas does not win in football, of course, at least not on a consistent basis definitely not enough to lure crowds to a football stadium now esthetically pleasing, but parking poor and plagued by persistent police pursuing tailgating imbibers.
Yet Kansas University’s projected financial difficulties can’t be laid solely at the feet of Big 12 attendance figures that rank ahead of only Baylor, the league’s lone private school.
Kansas University also has a football television problem, thanks to Big 12 rules that favor the state that contains half the television sets in the conference area. Hint: It’s an anagram of taxes.
The Big 12 divides half its television football revenue among its dozen members. But the other half is based on television appearances, and Kansas (K-State, too) are burdened by the comparatively paucity of TV sets in the Sunflower State.
“It would help if the Big 12 was like the Big 10 and SEC,” Frederick said. “They divide all their football TV money equally. Right now it’s not equal in the Big 12.”
Frederick said, in fact, that if it were equal he wouldn’t have had to call a special meeting of the KUAC to divulge his plan to drop two men’s sports and squeeze Allen Fieldhouse patrons.
No question Kansas University’s conference income has increased significantly since the death of the Big Eight and the birth of the Big 12, yet the gap between the top and bottom seems to be widening.
“I’m concerned about the disparity between the top and the bottom in the Big 12,” Frederick said. “We have budgets that go from $18 million up to $44 million.”
Putting it another way, Kansas University’s $23 million budget is about half the size of the largest.
David Ambler is one of the most respected voices on the Kansas University campus. Ambler’s title is vice chancellor of student affairs and, as such, he has been an ex-officio KUAC board member for two decades or so.
Ambler knows how the whole NCAA revenue process works, and he doesn’t like what he sees about costs, particularly for scholarships.
“I wonder if we’re making any effort at all at the NCAA and Big 12 levels about need-based financial aid,” Ambler said. “Grants are eating our lunch. Costs are rising, and I don’t see any effort to get this in control.
“We’re going down a road where only revenue sports will be part of college athletics.”
Frederick wasn’t about to disagree.
“I’m afraid some day there’ll be just 15 schools,” he said, “and all the rest of us aren’t there.”
Are Ambler and Frederick prescient? Or are they doomsayers?
We’ve all seen how the rich have become richer in major league baseball. Is the same thing happening in college athletics?