Alabama versus Clemson prediction: both teams will lose

Monday evening's college football championship game features two powerhouse teams: undefeated Clemson (14-0) versus perennial football power Alabama (13-1). With all the media attention on this game, expected to be one of the most-watched college football games ever, it's easy to find predictions for the winner. CBS has six experts all predicting an Alabama victory. SBNation lists Alabama as a one-touchdown favorite.

My prediction is different, and I'm 100% positive that I'm correct: both teams will lose. Don't get me wrong: the teams will play each other, and one of the teams will score more points, so the game itself will have a winner. But in this money-washed extravaganza, with coaches, schools, and television networks hauling in tens of millions of dollars, none of the players will be paid a single dollar.

Imagine this: the 100 players on each team's roster have spent their year entertaining millions of fans. They have played their hearts out on the field, risking injury (including the possibility of a life-altering concussion) in every game, all while pretending to be full-time college students pursuing an education. The pretense that they are "student athletes" is what allows the NCAA and the universities to maintain the fiction that players should not be compensated for their efforts on the field.

Don't get me wrong: there will be plenty of winners in Monday's game. The coaches, conferences, and colleges have already won. Alabama's head coach Nick Saban will be paid $7,087,481 this year. Clemson's coach Dabo Sweeney makes $3,305,200. Alabama and Clemson's assistant coaches make $1,500,000 and $1,404,807 respectively. USA Today calculated the total payroll of the football coaching staff for the four teams in the final two playoff games: $35,981,491, not including bonuses.

It's not just the football coaches who have won big. Athletic directors and their staffs have cashed in handsomely too. As the Washington Post reported a few weeks ago,

"In a decade, the non-coaching payrolls at the schools [in the five wealthiest athletic conferences], combined, rose from $454 million to $767 million."

The Post also compiled numbers showing that 34 football teams had staff payrolls above $1 million for non-coaching staff. Clemson has created an "associate athletic director of football administration" who alone makes $252,000.

But wait, there's more. The athletic conferences in which Alabama, Clemson, and the other major football powers play have been rewarding themselves handsomely, paying their commissioners from $2.0 to 3.5 million. As the Washington Post put it:

"As a reward for making an industry fueled by unpaid athletes more lucrative than ever, the men who run these conferences have enjoyed staggering pay hikes doled out by the leaders of many of America’s largest universities."

Much of this money comes from television contracts; the Wall St. Journal explains that the ACC (Clemson's conference) has a $3.6 billion contract with ESPN that lasts until 2027. ESPN is paying another $7.3 billion to televise the playoff and bowl games. None of that money goes to the players upon whom the entire enterprise depends.

When you watch the game on Monday (or any college football game), think about all that money going to the coaches, administrators, conference commissioners, and staff, while the players get nothing. The universities participating in this lucrative enterprise should be ashamed: they are making millions off the backs of unpaid athletes, while hiding behind the pretense that they are providing the athletes a fair return in the form of a college education. As I've written before, this is nonsense. Universities have been corrupted by the lure of cash, and they seem to have forgotten that they are in the business of educating students, not providing sports entertainment.

So yes, you will see some winners on Monday. They're the guys on both sidelines wearing headsets, making multi-million dollar salaries. After the game, they'll drive their expensive cars to their multi-million dollar homes. The players will return to their dorm rooms.

As for me, I find it increasingly difficult to enjoy watching college football. Every time a player gets shaken up by a hard tackle, I'm reminded that their playing careers are woefully short, and this might be the last time they have the chance to play in front of such a large audience. I think about how they'll feel 10 or 20 years from now, when they're limping around on bad knees while their former schools have long forgotten about them.

Colleges need to pay the players. And while they're at it, they can take steps to make sure that these students get a real education, such as offering free tuition, room, and board to the players for at least four years after they stop playing football. Until they do, all the players lose.

Football is still corrupting our universities. It needs to go.

(In which I again take on the football-industrial complex, and get myself in trouble with fans.)

It's happening again. The University of Maryland is about to pay millions of dollars to its football coach so they can fire him a year early, and proceed to hire a new football coach and pay him millions of dollars. All this at a time when the university is desperately strapped for cash, after years of hiring freezes, salary freezes, and unpaid furloughs for its employees.

What's truly astonishing is that U. Maryland did exactly the same thing just four years ago, and it has been a complete disaster. Here's how I described the scenario in 2011, when I was still a professor there:

• Pay $2 million to buy out the old coach, Ralph Friedgen, and hire a new one, Randy Edsall who will presumably boost attendance and revenue.
• Hire Edsall for $2 million per year, who then produced a losing season (2 wins, 10 losses), leaving games with even lower attendance than before.
• Because football is still losing money, get rid of 8 other varsity sports.

Yes, they really did eliminate 8 other sports in order to invest more in football. Here's what they cut: men’s cross-country, indoor track, outdoor track, men’s swimming and diving, men’s tennis, women’s acrobatics and tumbling, women’s swimming and diving, and women’s water polo.

None of this produced any tangible benefits, either financial or academic.

Now let's look at what U. Maryland is about to do now, after several embarrassing blowout losses this season:

• Pay $4.7 million to buy out the current coach, Randy Edsall. That's $2.1 million for the rest of this season and $2.6 million for next year. 
• Hire a new football coach and pay him at least as much as the old coach.
• Continue to impose unpaid furloughs and pay freezes on academic staff across the board.

Wow, this investment in football really seems to be working for U. Maryland.

What the heck is the U. Maryland president, Wallace Loh, thinking? 

Loh originally hired Edsall just a month after he (Loh) joined the university. One might attempt to explain this as a rookie error made by a new president. But this time he has no such excuse.

U. Maryland is by no means alone in its misguided emphasis on football. In 2012, the University of Florida announced it was eliminating its Computer Science program while simultaneously increasing the football budget. The ensuing outcry (spurred in part by my Forbes blog) convinced the administration to back down, but at the time they saw no irony in their plan to cut science education and spend more on football. 

Listen, sports fans: football is not the reason we have universities. Universities exist to provide education, no matter what the (sometimes rabid) football boosters may say. Some American universities (hello U. Chicago!) do extremely well without having a team at all. Outside the U.S., universities have no major sports programs at all–the students enjoy sports, as all young people do, but the universities focus on what they do best.

Yes, I know the arguments on the other side. “Football makes a profit,” some claim. To that I would say, so what? Universities could make a profit running a casino too – should they do that?

But just for the sake of argument, let's accept the premise that football is profitable. Great! In that case, we can spin off the teams as private corporations, and let them pay to use the university logos, stadiums, etc. The teams can pay the players, as any professional team must, and the students and alumni can continue to cheer on "their" teams, just as residents of Baltimore cheer for "their" professional, privately owned Ravens team. 

Let's face it: university administrations are simply not equipped to run a major sports and entertainment business, which is what college football has become. The spectable of U. Maryland spending $4.7 million simply to buy out its current football coach, when the university is desperately trying to save money for its core mission, demonstrates how corrupting the influence of football has become.

Even worse is the shameful abuse of the players, who serve as unpaid laborers while their coaches make millions. "We give them a free education," administrators and coaches respond. Yeah, right. College football is a multi-billion dollar industry, in which the athletes at the center of the game are prohibited from taking any money. Just pay them, and they can decide if they want to pay tuition with their own money.

If we make college football private, everyone wins. Universities keep their football revenue, the fans get their team, and the university no longer has to pretend that it's educating its unpaid football players. We could even set up the system so that players were given a proper academic scholarship after their playing days were over, which for most of them is just a few years. And perhaps best of all, the players would earn the paychecks they deserve. 

Otherwise, expect me to write another article in about five years, in which I will describe yet again how the University of Maryland (or some other school) is paying millions of dollars to buy out the contract of their football coach, while the school's academic mission is ignored.

University of Florida eliminates Computer Science Department. At least they still have football.

Wow, no one saw this coming.  The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.7 $1.4 million.  The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.

Let's get this straight: in the midst of a technology revolution, with a shortage of engineers and computer scientists, UF decides to cut computer science completely?

Students at UF have already organized protests, and have created a website dedicated to saving the CS department.  Several distinguished computer scientists have written to the president of UF to express their concerns, in very blunt terms.  Prof. Zvi Galil, Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech, is "amazed, shocked, and angered."  Prof. S.N. Maheshwari, former Dean of Engineering at IIT Delhi, calls this move "outrageously wrong."  Computer scientist Carl de Boor, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and winner of the 2003 National Medal of Science, asked the UF president "What were you thinking?"

(Note to the students, if you need more quotes for your site: I think this move is shockingly short-sighted.  The University of Florida is moving backwards while the rest of the world moves ahead.)

Meanwhile, the athletic budget for the current year is $99 $97.7 million, an increase of more than $2 million from last year.  The increase alone would more than offset the savings supposedly gained by cutting computer science.

Now, I'm not saying that UF has chosen football over science. Actually, the real villains here are the Florida state legislators, who have cut the budget for their flagship university by 30% over the past 6 years.

Meanwhile, just two days ago, Florida governor Rick Scott approved the creation of a brand-new public university, Florida Polytechnic University, to be located near the city of Tampa.  In an unintentionally ironic statement, Gov. Scott said

"At a time when the number of graduates of Florida's universities in the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] fields is not projected to meet workforce needs, the establishment of Florida Polytechnic University will help us move the needle in the right direction."

Heads up, Gov. Scott: no one is going to believe that you're supporting technical education when your flagship university is eliminating its Computer Science Department. Since cutting support for universities seems to be a major agenda item for you and the legislature, why stop at 30%?  With just a bit more cutting, you could get rid of those annoying universities entirely.  Let the rest of the country worry about higher education! Florida can focus on orange groves and golf courses. Oh, and football.

[Update 25 April 8:30pm: After my Forbes blog post on this topic went viral, UF President Bernie Machen announced that they are dropping their plan to eliminate Computer Science.  See my followup post here for details and a link.]