Is college athletics about education or financial profits?

Florida State University was left out of the football playoffs, despite its tough schedule and unbeaten record. The pundits and politicians are screaming. Gov. Ron DeSantis is willing to spend a million tax dollars to sue. But why do we have college football? The facts tell us it’s about the money and it’s about using our children as entertainers, despite the dangers.

Everyone loves the spectacle. Everyone loves the idea that athletic scholarships do good and that student athletes grow strong. But how many more know a kid who sustained a joint or head injury? How have many student athletes’ academics suffered from their near full time jobs as athletes? How many have been diverted from the education they needed for their career by dreams of glory and wealth?

Let’s look at the money. Last year (2022) according to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, FSU’s athletic program made $161,140,000 and spent $150,780,000. That’s big business.

Of the total athletic department income of $161 million, $60,160,000 came from ticket sales, media rights, and payments from the NCAA. That’s because inter-school competition is entertainment.

Of the total department spending of $151 million, $10,790,000 was paid out for athletic student aid, most of it transferred from one FSU pocket into another as scholarships. That means student athletes are hired on the cheap. The department also paid $121,550,000 for salaries to coaches and administrators and for overhead and indirect charges to the university. That means a lot of jobs and university operating funds depend on the program so decision makers are motivated to maintain the status quo. That is the same conflict of interest which contributed to the debacles at Penn State (Jerry Sandusky), at Michigan State (Larry Nasser), the mishandling of numerous sexual assaults by student athletes at Baylor, and who knows how many other less public failures.

The bottom line is that intercollegiate athletics is a very large entertainment industry, more than $20 billion per year nationwide. But where does it say that college football has anything to do with college? The answer is “nowhere.” There is no mandate for it in the founding principles or mission statements of FSU nor anywhere else. That simple fact means that every single injury sustained by a student athlete in practice or in a game was unnecessary. The same is true for every injury sustained in a high school program since they exist at least in part to feed their best to the universities. The terrible responsibility for every injury hence resides on every parent, coach, fan, trustee, and Florida voter who supports the system.

Inter-collegiate sport unnecessarily puts student athletes in harm’s way, degrades their education, perverts the purposes of America’s secondary and higher educational systems, and corrupts the financial structure of FSU and so many other great universities. Inter-school competitions are so thoroughly entrenched in America’s psyche as righteously wholesome that the facts and conclusions laid out here, though true, would surely elicit derision if not a good beating if repeated in any school board meeting or bar in the country.

Tallahassee resident Don Krieger is a research scientist whose focus is the electrical activity in the brain. His writing has appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Asahi Shimbun, and others.

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: The billion-dollar question: Does football belong in universities?