Comments about ‘Doug Robinson: There's a price to pay for playing in the big-time’

Ok. I am sending my check.

"Does the average engineering student or theater arts major care about the football team? Does the kid who's working nights to pay for tuition and overpriced textbooks want to pay for an NFL farm team?"

Yes, that bio-engineering student who's working a night job and trying to keep his GPA up so he can get into med school is really going to be excited about having his student fees jacked so that Utah won't have to share the PAC 12 cellar with Washington State.

I keep seeing people quote the $20 million per year number quoted for the PAC 12 TV contract, but the Cal AD has publicly discussed that the early years of this contract will only bring $9-10 million to the fully vested league teams. This looks like a mighty big hole for the Utes if they are in an arms race against programs that already spend substantially more each year.

Looks like I'm stuck here in the basement for a few more years.

pac 10 plus 2 ain't all that great, usc on probabation and can't play in a bowl for the next few years. oregon is okay. the washington and arizona teams are average at best.

And this is news?

And every one thought that the advertisers and the media people were paying for this huge PAC 10.2 windfall.

LOL

Got my tix. Too many naysayers. If you don't like it, don't watch.

This article is disingenuous. The University of Utah received over $450 million in research and training awards in 2009-2010. Their net revenue in 2007 (last year for which I could easily find data) was over $2.3 billion.

So you're going to look at a $32 million athletic department budget and tell me, "These days, big universities have become football corporations with a school attached, not vice versa." What a load of garbage.

Is there a reason a program that's going to be rolling in the dough needs to gouge poor working students?

Re: Crimson Ute
As a university faculty member who has been at least partially responsible for bringing in over $500K in research funding in the past year, that's exactly the point: we've brought in the money. If I want to spend more on research, I write grants and, once the money arrives, I work within that budget. I don't increase my lab size and ask the students to pay for that increase. While I'm happy for the university's successful transition to the Pac-12 and the increased visibility this brings to our academic programs, it makes no sense to increase the burden of the athletics budget on the backs of the students.

The only way the students should be paying for the athletic program is through ticket and merchandise sales.

RE Crimson Ute - GREAT point we are the farm leagues for corporate America. In most industrialized nations corporations pay taxes that are specifically designated to pay for the cost of the trained employees they currently receive for free. Charge the students for an education that produces engineers, biologists, chemists, nurses etc. for big business. Corporate Socialism.

Here's another one word reason = Alums. I just joined the Crimson club for the first time in 12 years.

Re ERDoc: It makes no sense to increase the burden of the athletics budget on the backs of students. Huh? How much does your ER room pay for the training of the doctors and nurses. I'm betting it's about $0.00.

Raising ticket prices is supply and demand.

Raising student fees is garbage.

I wounder what schools are losing money, AQ or non-AQ schools? If it's mostly non-AQ schools then why doesn't the governing body, NCAA, create a revenue generating scheme like a playoff system?

I've paid for my tickets... happily so.

You get what you pay for and we get caffeine in or diet coke.

Oh my, my, my. All these fits of jealousy. It is almost enough to make one wish we were going independant.

A big problem with the cost, is that the more attended and popular sports like football, are forced to give money to sports that only the athletes and their families go to. Especially with womens sports. The fan draw isn't there, their ticket sales suffer, so football is forced to subsidize the other athletes.

Instead of making college sports a mini-socialists state. Let them compete. Let these other sports become creative in getting fans. Football didn't start with 100,000 screaming fans. It's something they have built up year after year. The Utah football team used to play on a field with wood bleachers. Now they have a stadium and a band. They didn't always have that.

Get political correctness out of sports. Save it for the classroom, where some professors work hard to indoctrinate students to follow the annointed one.

Notice how the talk turned from how the university would be raising ticket prices and tuition to how government grants should be and were being used to fund department budgets? It's not just the students and fans paying for all this. It's every taxpayer paying for every grant at every university.

We all love our college athletic programs but they are just part of whats wrong with big government. And big government is whats wrong with America these days. Something has to change.

If students object to the fees at Utah, let them attend BYU.

Yeah,

Independence is way better.

And cheaper too.