Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20151207

Please join me for these wonderful young people that have joined there is a call talent. [applause] we would like to highlight an Upcoming Event at the Nixon Library on sunday december 6 at 12 noon in the east room of the Nixon Foundation will host the sixth annual honoring hometown heroes event. Where we recognize those that have given their lives in military service from across southern california. This is honoring the gold star families and we invite you to attend and join in honoring them in and the front will be signing copies of his books tough as they come if you are as inspired as i am by his presentation tonight, this incredible warrior iraq amid u. S. Urges a copy of the book which is available. This concludes the program this evening. Thank you for being here. God bless our veterans and the United States of america. [applause] now on booktv after words with pulitzer prizewinning journalist gilbert examines the Business Culture of College Football. Interviewed by tom mcmillan former u. S. Representative from maryland and the president president and ceo of the Division Athletic directors association. Its great to be with you today. As a former student athlete and is someone that has worked on student athlete reform issues for many years i really enjoyed your book you i bought it as soon as it came out, so its great to be with you today. I guess the most obvious question after your career covering so many diverse areas like Homeland Security and pharmaceuticals how in the world did you get into College Sports . [laughter] i have had in a classic career, havent i. . Guest i got into College Sports in a couple of ways like you although not nearly at your level. I played sports at high school and college. I had an athletic scholarship that became an academic scholarship after i injured my back. About 15 or 16 years ago i did a project at the Philadelphia Inquirer where i begin to work at the business College Sports. At some point i would love to come back and just look at the influence of College Football because even then it already had an impact on the universities and then what happened was it just continue to grow and the money continued to grow dramatically. I propose doing a project at the washington post. They didnt want to do it. I proposed it as a book seven years ago. My agent wasnt that interested back then about a year later and suggested that it was time for the book on College Football so i kind of laughed because im not quite sure if you remember any way he convinced me to do a proposal and eventually we sold it and life is i was off and running. A lot of it is about College Sports and i was surprised obviously how much had changed created as a student athlete, theres always issues can raise but they are also positive issues. The experience of being a student athlete was a great one for me and i wondered if that perspective was something that you thought about. I thought about it. There is no question that it is a positive experience. From the standpoint of the normal business aspects and the scaling up of the money of football and how the Financial Model have changed over the decades. I decided i was going to write a book about the economics about the experience of student athletes themselves so i would say that the experience can be very different is our. Of money and pressure involved in the sports today and i think that its a lot harder to be a truly serious student athlete when you are playing both sports at that level than a lot of other schools and particularly as you go down the ranks. Host it was hard to do that and play basketball. Watching the debates you hear things about income inequality that the 450,000 kids going through the College Sports writenow getting degrees that may not have had the opportunity i know that your book really focused on the business side. If you look at the history of the model, what has changed is that decades ago president s were embarrassed by what they were seeing and it was a combination of scandals, academic scandals, cheating scandals that would routinely pop up and i think that they were embarrassed by the commercialization of College Football because we are talking about the book is College Football so im going to limits to that. And what happened was the idea using the universal dollars as athletics somehow tainted the university. I happen to disagree with that and made a terrible mistake by coming to that line of thinking but what they did was they basically went to the Athletic Directors and said we want to do this thats great. What we want you to come up with the money on their own. So the model evolved over the decades where College Football was most visible and the richest sport. I wont say that it was the easiest monetized but the athletics were incredibly successful at monetizing because the demand was so great. They were known as the donations and i hope we will talk about this at some point that increased dramatically. The revenues from tickets themselves increased and then the other corporate money in the advertising and now the digital scoreboard advertising and the nike under armour so this model around football evolved to the point where today schools that play at the most elite level of the socalled super conferences or power conferences, its not unusual for football to account for anywhere between 52 as much as 70 of all of their revenue flowing into the Athletics Department. So think about how that influences universities and how it influences the Athletics Department and the pressure that that brings to bear on the Athletic Department on the Athletic Directors and a laughable coach at south. But i was trying thats what i was trying to explore looking at it in my book. Host they funded a lot of the growth in the College Sports into those are more important in the schools and the bigger schools but that an area where students are beginning to say what how am i going to continue to pay this education going up. Any thoughts about that . Asked that a lot. Its interesting because i ran out of space to have a whole separate chapter on the issue but i do have some thoughts. I what we see now that these schools are roughly 60 or 65 of them and it is the move towards paying what they are calling the full cost of attendance which is basically involves giving the players and additional couple of thousand of dollars that maybe up to 5,000 they basically signed off on this but it is the conferences. I have absolute leave no issue with that. I think clearly the players are the ones that are responsible for all of this money. So, why not give them that money. But what i think about it though is down the line. I dont think we are quite at the Tipping Point that we are getting towards the Tipping Point where the pressure to play even more, to move the model even further to the edges of the canvas where it becomes even more of a semi pro model and again we are talking about football although i think that you can probably reminisce back. And finally i dont think the players in a few years are going to be satisfied just with a couple of thousands of dollars. I think they are going to look around and some of them are quite smart. At least they are smart enough to see where the money is and how what the coaches are being paid to ask why shouldnt they be getting more. So, what i worry about a little bit is a bit pressure to play a more significant amounts of money where you are bidding for a Great Quarterback in california were a great linebacker in western pennsylvania and picking up the price that they actually have to pay for that player. Its not impossible but we wont get to that model but as you get to that model theres all kinds of consequences of the current model. If you are paying the players significant money more than just a few thousand dollars on top of the scholarship are you finally admitting that College Football as its practiced its practice after the elite schools truly is a large forprofit or commercial business, and okay then we are going to pay taxes. So you use this umbrella that exists in the current model where we still pretend that the sports are more educational experience. Those are a few of my thoughts. One of them you talk about is title ix. Guest it can guest it can be a problem for title ix. Some folks are talking about a situation where basically football and mens basketball would be over here almost any kind of box if you will invest far corner of campus and then you would take all of the other sports, the socalled olympics sports or where the nonrevenue sports, i called them for sports because they dont generate much money. They would in effect be pulled back inside of the university more towards a model that used to exist and would be funded out of the university dollars at that point in time. In terms of title ix come if you are going to pay these other players a lot of money i would think at some point someone will file a lawsuit and say if you are paying those players ten or 20,000 by shouldnt the volleyball player get ten or 20,000 with a baseball player assuming there is even still a Baseball Team at the College Soccer player or field hockey players of your entering this uncertain era as we go along and i think that theres a lot of complicated questions that people a lot smarter than me are going to have to figure out. Guest your observations are very keen and one of the things you focus on a great deal is president ial control and the fact in your view you quote the president ial control has been a failure. They throw their hands up because of the difficult situation but then to manage why do you think president ial control has not . Guest we are talking about football and as you suggested, you were going to scale back football at a place like ohio state. Or alabama or georgia or florida , what would happen . The president president at the elite football schools seem to run out of town when i showed up but ive interviewed a lot of president s of the smaller schools that were brave enough to speak with me. And they all basically said the same thing. They would lose their job tomorrow jobs tomorrow if they became truly aggressive at about policing that he and cracking down on the various abuses and questioning whether it really makes sense to pay a football coach 5 million or 7 million or 4 million a year when president himself were herself is as being paid 500,000 a professor is earning 110 or 120 of these large universities. I mean, really they probably would lose their jobs. We saw at the university of alabama birmingham president there a year ago tried to eliminate football a much smaller program and interactive especially good one and we can argue that whether it makes money or loses money, but he almost lost his head and now has reach wrenched and bring it back so they will be back at College Football at the level. Its incredibly i recognize that its incredibly complicated for the president s. I absolutely do recognize that its not an easy thing. On the other hand, they are the ones that are charged with leading the university mission. So who else is going to lead this and say enough is enough at a certain point maybe we need to look at this a little more closely than we do. I am harsh on the president s and i think youre absolutely right pointing that out, but its fair i went back and read 40 years worth of congressional testimony hearings. I read all of the reports that for the president ial task force put out and we read out all the stuff that stuff the president s were associated with and when you read that history a few things are clear to me. When the president understands the problem. They talk relentlessly about the escalation of the cost and impact on their schools and how they would like to change it and then the second point is they throw up their hands and say we are powerless to do anything about it. We need somebody outside of the university to tell us what to do and the question then who is it going to be . The ncaa i dont think so. Its going to be congress. If you look at the history of the congress, forgive me you know, former congressman, but its not great. You know, they have written into law tax breaks for some of this. Theyve backed away from some of the reforms. I dont know, maybe im being a little harsh. You tell me. Host when i was in congress, bill bradley and myself, the congressman ed towns, we put together the students right to know bill which requires schools to disclose the Graduation Rates of the students and that has to do a lot of Reform Efforts including the apr in schools disclosing. I also believe that having been a trustee in the region for the last eight years i believe that the trustees in the region need to be more involved. Often times when i first got involved in the university of maryland board they werent so i do think the president s need some of that support to make the right decision and to make sure the programs running with sound principles and so forth. So i throw that out as a point, but the one thing that really caught me in the book was you talk about the biggest threats in this model not necessarily being players being paid or concussions or any of those things, but the biggest threat is a lot of the millennial czar losing their attention span. Its not focused on the games. Talk about that. Its interesting. Guest i will do plenty throwback one thing in response to what you said you i agree with you 100 on including the region of the trustees. They absolutely need to be involved in that and maybe thats enough. But one other thing i would say that is on the academic metrics graduation, those are good for sure. But i would like to see one other metric. I have a conversation with the former president in the university thats written books about academics. And athletics. They are good books. He made the point that what is really needed is a longitudinal study where you look at maybe one year and pick all the Football Players who are on the team that year and then track them over a period of time say five or ten years and look at what happened to them by peers out, ten years out and lets go back and measured and how many of them graduated, how many of them have a job that is somehow tied to the third degree, was it useful or was it clustered into the majors that basically arent going to help them once they graduate, or the even working . That is the study. I think the mca could start doing that if they were pressured by the president or the congress to do that and i think any reason they dont do if they are afraid with the results are going to show. Back to that point for a second, i agree with you. The outcomes are very important and i actually talked to the ncaa about this. This is an important issue because the proof is what happens to these kids when they leave school and in my own experience, which is somewhat dated, but a lot of the kids did very well and some didnt do as well but at the university of maryland for the whole student body beaded longitudinal studies and we want to see how they are faring in the marketplace and thats how we come up with the statistics that it probably means more about a Million Dollars more of income over your life and so i think that this is a very important point because i think ultimately it will show the truth here. I do, too. If i could recommend one thing today, thats what i would recommend. So, to go back to the other question, i was playing around with this idea of technology and the impact of this potential disruptive impact on College Football, i got interested in this after i heard that students were leaving the university of alabama Football Games at halftime. I assume this was during the fallout that alabama played but it was significant enough that they approved of the students the following week for keeping the games but it got me thinking a little bit about why would they leave the games and what does this generation of students like and the answer is there is a lot more distraction then probably i was worried you were or the parents were or grandparents were treated so i am wondering, the impact can come in two ways. One is the access point, how you experience they gain in the way that the tv model works in the content they can charge large Advertising Fees in the Cable Companies and make a lot of money but what i wonder about is downstream basically we are getting this feed from a lot of smaller devices. Does that impact the economics or the revenue stream of the ability to charge advertising and so forth and then the other thing i wonder about is trust simply if you have a phone in your hand or some other device in your hand if and youre constantly going like this and not really paying much attention to the game, is that going to have an impact both inside the stand and outside of the stand and i think that for talking with people it probably is going to have some impact. And so far when i ask the Athletic Directors about the state laugh a little bit but they also then tell me how pretty much they were investing large amounts of money into improving the experience inside of the stadium which im not quite sure its a winning formula to protect yourself but we will see. Its a very interesting observation because it is happening at the university of maryland. They are coming to the game less frequently and want to use their phones and all those things are distractions. But its interesting because whats happening is that television dollars continue to grow. So obviously that will continue to support the Business Model. So its interesting to see when you talk about the bubble and the fact thats where the potential that where the potential risk is, i actually think that the real risk here is if one of the lawsuit prevails and the players are out to compete in the marketplace, that will just open the pandoras box of issues. I dont want to overstate the Technology Impact because i do think it is beginning to have an impact and it will have a little bit more as we go down the line, but i agree with you that if one of the antitrust lawsuits or one of the are one of the others plays out or the player is simply any point in the future to say if you want to continue to have football have to pay real money and we go to a more competitive market model i would say all bets are off. Does the university continue to own the team or maybe you set it up as a limited Liability Corporation or forprofit company and its a subsidiary of the university or maybe it becomes even more standalone than it is today. But i agree with you, i think there are a lot of really serious implications that i wish people writing of this narrative today in the sports pages would get a little more engaged in this those potential impacts and dreaming about. I think a lot of the focus is on a great athlete but often times has access but most kids dont. The tuition 70,000 a year and the whole 260 kids are getting scholarships that all of a sudden if you go into a competitive marketplace, 260 kids wont get 70,000 scholarships, so a lot of it to kids who are benefiting in the system right now will be left on the sidelines. So as you point out, it is a very complicated issue. But going switching subjects into the sort of coaches area in Chapter Three you talk about the art of painting the coach not coach was thinking about my alma mater and more recently the university of maryland and what its done. What are your comments on that . Its been an interesting week for coaches. You have been quitting of South Carolina committee kept saying dont use the word retire. Basically cutting. That was interesting. You had ufc getting fired with problems into the question is going to become whats going to happen the job and then you have north texas where he think the coach got fired after a blowout game and then that was interesting and i dont follow football closely so i would say for me at least it was a little bit surprising but then i read the stories and i found the Athletic Directors comments really interesting and unless im misreading it it seemed to be we need somebody a lot more exciting than the coach and we need to have a more open kind of offensive system where one of these offenses are scoring a gazillion planes because i assumed that keeps the fans engaged in the stand. But then the other side of it was that her months ago i talked about if i had these states run that for months ago they extended the contract by a couple of years and at that point were saying in so many words we think that he is the guy to take us to the next level whatever the next level is and here we are four months later firing them in the middle of the season and then when you hire somebody like that, he still has any number of years left on the contract somewhere between three and using the estimates as far on his contract between the left over this year and a year or two more than he had gone out so im interested in the whole issue from the standpoint of the metrics used to pay, what does it say about the university and the impacts and who actually has the leverage in these negotiations . I argue in my book that its not a true marketplace, its not transparent, the coaches and their agents have the leverage and the athletic characters are all too willing to open up the checkbooks in order to keep the model running and keep the money coming in the pubs to subsidize the other sports as well as the employees and all of the salaries. This is absolutely a fascinating thing. It is tough decision. I know with marylands attendance falling into the revenue declining it becomes a difficult choice particularly with a coach that has done well academically these are never easy. But its happening across the country. So its not unique to maryland. I do agree with you that over the years i think that the leverage has been more with the coach dan the school and the idea. And if you look to give an example back when i was in Congress Congress in the early 90s i had a hearing on one of the issues with the coaches salaries and i was talking about the fact that there wasnt a milliondollar salary at that point. Its kind of funny that theyve gone out of the roof and a couple of years. After the 99 season come he was earning 667,000 at Michigan State at the time and some of the assistant Athletic Directors told me he was unhappy. He felt underappreciated and wanted another opportunity outside of the school to make more money i assume of endorsement deals and in any case he gets hired away by lsu for 1. 2 million who do they send on the booster plane to talk with him none other than mark who was the the chancellor at baton rouge and of course is now the ncaa president. Fast forward to today come and there were . 1 million at alabama so alabama so you just see that in a decade long period or however long it is, the escalation in his salary i write about that in the book because i think that its a good example of what has occurred with the coaches southeast salaries. Host staying on that point for the second view right about the move to the big ten, which i was in the region at the time but more so because of the process, there was a very deviated process i thought we needed more about, collaborate on the comment on that subject. Its interesting from any number of perspectives. Maryland was interesting at that point in time because they were having what they were beginning to have at least Financial Issues in the Athletic Department. They were eliminating i think eight sports, correct me if im wrong on that, including the crosscountry indoor and outdoor track that broke my heart because when i was a High School Track athlete in the mid60s and late 60s, maryland was one of the go to programs of the country just a terrific track program so that you know i went out and i interviewed jim delaney and i asked him as the commissioner of the big ten and i went to the prep school three years ahead of me, great basketball player. Anyway, you know i asked him about maryland and rutgers and again it comes back to manage and money and economics from the research standpoint in academics and size but geographically it is valuable to the big ten because it allows them to block up geography and helps the recruiting lines for the schools but also expands the market for the big ten cable network. Jim said theres 13 million between new york city down and if we get a million of those, thats going to be great needing this obstruction for the ten networks of the economics are there. Now for maryland, i dont know enough about their declining attendance but the amount of money they can make when they become a fullfledged member of the big ten command i forget how many years that takes come it takes a few to be fairly significant from what they were getting when they belonged and its probably a magnitude of ten to 15 additional millions of dollars, and again you probably know the triggers better than i do. So at a certain point i think that they will be making somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 million that will get passed through from the conference and conceivably that could continue to grow in the network if it continues to thrive so from that standpoint financially, it probably make sense athletically im not so sure. Will they be able to compete at that level were successfully at that level what about the travel costs, what other impacts will have on impact will that have on the student athletes those are all questions that i think im waiting to see the answers. I think you are right on. Financially it was a very strong move for maryland and the main part of the consortium of research as a region it came to us very quickly and we had very little time to deliberate. But a lot of these things are driven by pure dollars and cents and the fact that it was the fourth Largest Television market, this conference, reshuffling the backs from time to time to build a bigger conference package is an interesting phenomenon and i always go back to the Supreme Courts decision, 1984 in the oklahoma case when the ncaa loss to. Nobodys chasing the almighty dollar. I think i took a couple of years for that to play out initially it was kind of interesting initially a fair number correctly. Then i began to spike up and you begin to see this, the Cable Companies like espn becoming very aggressive, fox news default. They are bidding on contracts, cbs, abc, now of course they have the exclusive notre dame contract. So, that money really begins to flow into the 90s and it really explodes particularly at the end of the decade with the 12 contract for 3 billion. And now the s. Cc network c. C. Network and the Big Ten Network with this money and its not surprising from an economic standpoint or market standpoint but i think the athletic characters in the schools would say mia in the right conference. And maybe i would be better off being at another conference i could make more money or in the case of the Old Southwest conference, look at texas a and m. Where they look at texas getting the exclusive contract for the Longhorn Network espn and they thought that would hurt them and also hurt them financially because i think the big 12 was the only one that didnt go ahead and form its own Conference Network that didnt get the boost in Television Money coming in and the Athletic Director basically saw this happening and the sad i dont want to belong to this conference anymore come and not being stupid, they looked at it and saw a way to the texas market which is huge and invited texas a and m. To join the fcc come and they get a whole lot more money and they did gave it a 450 or 60 milliondollar renovation of the football stadium and a 20,000 feet all this stuff plays off of one another and snowballs so from that standpoint its not surprising at all that they are chasing dollars from the standpoint of the impact on the schools and the royalties in things like that i think its one other issue. I think maryland was in for Something Like 61 years when it jumped to the big ten. That has to have some kind. Host you talk about all this spending and the tremendous acceleration in the growth of revenue. If you have a crystal ball, how is this this thing to be limited or how do you bring some sense to this whole model . I had an interesting conversation with a writer, whos actually from a good website in which he suggested that if it goes to a competitive model where you are bidding for the players and bidding up the amount you are going to pay to the players its possible that somehow begins to help rationalize the marketplace from the standpoint of a while then maybe youre going to pay a little less money because you have less money available. Maybe it forces out some of the excess and facilities pending in the Athletic Department, back offices. I dont know enough to know whether that would happen or not there is the possibility of the Younger Generation being less interested and attendance i think if i read correctly last year attendance was actually down overall and if i try and get slightly downward, and i dont want to overstate the impact that i would be a little bit worried about that. I think it is slightly up this year. But your point is over the trendline guest yes i think the trendline is that it begins to slow a little bit. I mean it has to slow little bit because i think the revenue from tv is going slow and you see that a little bit with espn which is beginning to make noise where its earnings arent quite where they were in the past and the part of the tradition to that is while they paid so much in the last round to contracts i dont think the next round of television contracts will be for the Cable Networks and the regular networks wont be quite as lucrative as the past round has been but that said, but i dont know is the fcc network, the Big Ten Network, these kind of separate Inhouse Networks seem to be doing quite well. Maybe those Revenue Streams will help make some of it up. So the long answer to the question is for the time being it stays basically where its at. I think if we had the conversation ten years from now its going to look different than it looks today and i do think that it will be a little less rich than it possibly is today or it will begin to slow down a little bit. Guest talking to the president in maryland he said that as the toughest decision that he ever had to make for those kids who were involved in those sports as you said that on a national level, the sports these sports really make up our olympic movement, the grassroots for the olympics. Have you thought about that and what that means if you end up the Business Model is that sports make money maybe a third in and all these others have to be subsidized but they are important. Guest i thought about it a lot. Thats a good point that youre making. I hadnt thought about the potential impact on the line for things like the olympics or pick another major events worldwide. Youre right that could have an impact as you eliminate some of those sports just to keep the Football Program or the Basketball Program running. I would worry about that. These sports are tremendously important at that level and i would argue that having gone out to places like wisconsin and kansas state and being there at the crack of dawn to watch them practice and go out on the water and watched them practice and how hard they practice and yet when you talk with the athletes and interview, you find that they truly are the model of student athletes, the old greek ideal majoring in real sports and balancing really difficult schedules and getting up before dawn to go work out on the water and in the cold and heat, you name it so i would certainly not want to see those sports go away this may be inevitably naive thought but my thinking about all this is if you truly believe, and i do, that athletics are educational and important to the university then why would you be embarrassed about using university dollars, general revenue funds to pay for them . The answer i keep coming back to is its all this excess that worries the president and wants them to say football you need to pay for yourself and by the way we need you to subsidize these other sports but why cant you pull them back at least to the olympic sports and fund them out of general revenue and even with title ix, i dont think its going to make it expensive. I dont think that its going to create a situation where you are constantly playing around with numbers which is what is happening today to achieve proportionality. I think it could do that with the olympic sports to pull them back and have them inside of the budget in spite of the budget and fund them with university dollars and it wouldnt be truly that big of a problem. I think if you are transparent about it and explain it to the other students who in effect are paying for it they probably would go along with it. Host is a challenge and doing well in the olympics as part of the national interest. Is it to your point about all these kids are going to school we always focus on football but obviously the challenge is great you look across the board at all the other sports and those kids do well academically come and they truly are the greek ideal that you pointed out and sometimes it is overlooked when we talk about these issues. Guest i agree with you and the athletes ive spoken with, they truly do have real majors. They are premed, prelaw, studying nursing, studying economics, biology, math, take what you think of as a real major and they are majoring in it and its really quite impressive and something that needs to be supportive. What you have seen over the last few decades was the issue of the money sports and football and basketball in particular in the Business Model because its driving the revenue stream is that it creates this act and thats why youve seen so many sports eliminated in order to keep football running along at the size or scale it keeps running out as opposed to being a more modest operation than it is and a fair number of athletes probably thousands of athletes who have lost scholarships. Host what really interests me about the book as you talk about the growth of facilities and salaries and so forth but also academic support which i think is one of the fastestgrowing areas at the department and you kind of elaborate about that. Obviously these kids are getting a lot of support and the bad is where you see situations where certain universities are helping these kids literally get through school by doing their work, so talk about that. Guest i mean, whats interesting to me the couple things. One is that the rise of Academic Support Centers and programs, which is what they are called, is something youve seen in the last two decades. And the schools now send the large elite schools are spending basically became two, three, 4 million just on operations for the centers that covers everything from the employees, tutors, reading and writing specialists, learning specialists for athletes with disabilities, life skills coaches, you name it. So the operational costs annually are quite extensive and then theres the added cost of building the center. I went to the university of portland where they basically built a 42 milliondollar Academic Support Center thats extraordinarily lavish, just unbelievable that looks like a modern museum of art. You couldnt have a nicer facility. And i visited and spend time with the director, great guy. I think youre right you can look at it with two different ways. You can say to yourself this is a great thing. Schools have a responsibility to these athletes if you can recruit people in and if they are not if they are a standard deviation behind the means of the undergraduate population you have a responsibility to help them along. As i write in billiondollar baltimore there is another way of thinking about it and that is what did another example of the extraordinary list you have to go to to keep certain athletes eligible to play and hopefully at least on the track to get some kind of a degree whether it is particularly useful or not. So it is you have different ways of thinking about this issue and i think about it in both ways and i write about them in that way. I will say though that if you look at the scandals, and thereve been quite a number of academic continuing scandals as you know over the last decade or so they seem to pop up every month or so, the most recent and dramatic one which started a few years ago, the university of North Carolina is still ongoing where athletes were being funneled into the coffee per classes where all you have to do is turn in a ten page paper at the end of the semester if there were no classes and you are basically guaranteed a b. Or a. And that kind of thing. When you look at the scandals what you see is most of the time, one way or another they point back to the Academic Support Center and when i think about that, what that tells me is the pressure plate on the centers, the pressure for them to keep the players eligible in these troubled sports is just fundamentally dramatic. Its just wrapped up so much as the pressure to keep the revenue going has ramped up so too has the pressure to keep these athletes eligible for the last decade or so. So its not easy. Host its interesting because as you said, theres good and bad here. Maryland, to give an example we always would ask the provost are there athletes highly concentrated on a given class and thats one question right there will give you an answer whether youve got some issues to deal with and again that is where the trustees and the region can play a role. I agree with you and that is a critically important point and i looked at the goals and the football rosters and the majors that they enlisted for the players and it clearly is occurring at almost every school in certain subjects you would see disproportionately large number of athletes in certain majors and they were not the harder major favor those with less lab work, less math requirements that left more Time Available to train. Its that simple and i worry about those athletes and what happened to them assuming they get a degree where they end up with a degree later on which is why its important to study that. The other thing is, they begin to collect data on stuff five years ago and they said they regretted make it public and it still isnt public. I mean i think a real simple easy to do and it will probably be in the politics here is why not on their website by school and buy sports list the majors and athletes. You dont have to put names, just members. I think that would have a fairly interesting impact on schools because it is a truly important work. Host the disclosure is a great disinfectant is a former Supreme Court Justice Brandeis said it is very important because the more disclosure i think the more transparency in the system. We only have a few minutes but i do have to ask about football. Talk about that. When you say that theres football in the schools or programs guest you have this group was whether it is 60 or 65 that are getting all this money and attention and then you have these other 60 i think it is trying to play division i football and it ranges from boise state which is quite good at playing football and frankly is desperate to get into the packed while pack 12 but it hasnt quite happened yet down to the eastern michigan and new mexico state and Florida Atlantic and Florida International universitys, schools are trying to compete at the highest most extensive level as the other schools but dont have the models so it doesnt work for them. People dont go to their games and they end up having to buy their own tickets in order to be at the ncaa requirement that you average 15,006 sales over six years. They are still paying their coaches a lot of money, they are still investing huge amounts of money at places like akron and stadiums, 60, 70 million but nobody goes to the games. They dont have the Television Revenue because they are not part of Major Conferences where they have Major Television contracts. They dont have their own networks of or the revenue stream just doesnt work. When i asked i interviewed probably 12 College President s at these types of schools and i always ask that i always ask them the question while why did you do this, what is the opportunity and they would see from the business standpoint it probably doesnt make any sense. Its just not working but we think that if we dont have a Football Program that we are going to be viewed as not a Real University. They actually have president s say that to me. While we wont be a Real University if we you dont have a large football stadium come if we dont have a large football team, and then they said you know, its also the one thing that we can do to draw the largest amount of attention to our school. And i thought about that and i thought you know, thats an interesting thing to say. Its all that sad for one thing. And then the other thing is do you mean by that that you think that youre going to attract more applicants for students to come to school because your school because you have a losing football team, that logic just doesnt quite work for me and when you look at places like akron, which is going through a serious retrenchment with lots of layoffs, 60 milliondollar hole in its longterm Financial Plan and using all the cutbacks it is everything except football. They still dont touch football because there is a magical thinking that if you just have football but somehow in the long run its all going to pay off. Host its amazing because universities get amazing donations to the Athletic Department that i saw georgetown just got 50 million. So is it still the front porch that attracts a lot of money and i can see why schools take that risk. Its an interesting thing to watch. Im sure youve been noticing all of the fantasy football stuff. What do you think all of that means for football sports . Guest i watched the nfl and incredibly annoying they are relentless. And if you look at it whats been written about opinion clearly it doesnt the idea that you would be better if you just bet 5 to make a Million Dollars is absurd. Its not going to work. And the really serious ones are the ones making all the money. Think you, i really appreciate being on the