#mac vs. sec

It's often argued that we have to allow all of FBS to agree on a maximum level of athletic compensation for college athletes because it preserves competitive balance.  Today I'm going to explore the truth of that assertion.

As I've shown elsewhere, there is no competitive balance with respect to landing top recruits -- 99.3% of the Top 100 recruits (across 10 years) have gone to BCS AQ conferences.   But there's more to it than that.  The problem with the argument is that athletic compensation costs are just a small piece of the cost of putting on football and it's pretty clear that there is no competitive balance between the Have schools and the Have Nots.

Today's case study is the MAC conference, the FBS conference based primarily in Ohio and Michigan.  Over the past 10 years, the MAC got 0.1% of the thousand best recruits, and they only got that one person because his Ohio State scholarship offer was revoked after a (later-disproved) sexual assault indictment.  But how does the conference do on the field?

Last year, the MAC was 3 - 25 against BCS AQ schools.  I challenge anyone to call that competitive balance.  Against the SEC, the MAC was 0-3, by a combined margin of 28 -133.  And these were not Alabama and Auburn.  Two of the three losses were against SEC also-rans Kentucky and Vanderbilt (the third loss was to Florida).  Again, if you call that competitive balance, I think you are using the word differently than I do.

So that's how they did on the field.  How about their facilities?

MAC school Ball State plays its games at Scheumann Stadium, which holds 22,500 fans, although over the past two years, attendance has been below 15,000.  In 2010, Ball State's total attendance for the whole season was about 66,500 over six games.

In contrast, this is SEC school LSU's Tiger Stadium

It has a listed capacity of 92,542, but in 2010 LSU averaged 92,718 attendees per game, i.e., more than 100% attendance.  If you took the entire 2010 attendance at all Ball State games, added in 3 home games at fellow-MAC member Bowling Green, you'd still have room for thousands of fans inside of Tiger Stadium.

Anyone see any competitive equity yet?

Let's look at the total program of these two schools.

According to LSU's self-reported figures, LSU spends $25.6 million on its football team.  This is almost 5 times what Ball State says its spends on its football team, $5.3 million.  Again, I'm having trouble finding competitive equity.  This is not what I would expect to see if Ball State were funneling the money it saves on scholarship costs into making their football team more competitive.

Does Ball State strive for competitive balance with LSU through coaching pay?  Not really.  LSU pays Les Miles $3.75 million per year.  Ball State pays its coach (who happens to be named Stan Parrish) $350,000 per year.  In other words, you could take what LSU pays Les Miles for one year and pay 10 Ball State head coaches and still have enough money left over to get Les Miles a $250,000 vacation home for the off-season.

Indeed, I'm having trouble seeing any place where Ball State and LSU have any competitive equity. 

THIS PARAGRAPH UPDATED BASED ON LSU & BALL STATE DETAILS RECENTLY RECEIVED: Oh wait, there is one spot.  Scholarship expense!  LSU figures show that spends approx. $31,000 on each football player's financial aid.  This has an element of funny money to it  -- it's money LSU pays to LSU, so it's not a good indication of their REAL scholarship expense -- but it's based on LSU's NCAA filings and so it's the best I can do quickly.  According to Ball State's NCAA filing, Ball State spends about $25,000 per scholarship for each football player.  So although LSU spends 400% more its program and almost 1000%  more on its coach than Ball State (and has reevenue something like 42 times ball State's revenues, by the way), it only spend 25% more than Ball State per football scholarship.  So on this one area, they have something like competitive balance.

(Also, note that LSU's expense for the entire team of athletes is about $1 million less than what it pays Les Miles)

So the schools have no balance on recruiting, on winning, on facilities, on attendance, on overall football spending, or on coach's salaries.  None of the above are subject to a nationwide agreement across the NCAA.  Only on scholarship costs, where these is a nationwide agreement (arguably, a cartel), are Ball State and Louisiana State in a state of (relative) competitive balance.

So basically, schools agree on what they will spend on scholarships, not to achieve competitive balance for any measure that affects fans (not wins, not attendance, not high quality coaching and not overall program spending), but instead only to achieve scholarship cost equity.  See the circularity there?  We need to all give the same athletic scholarships because if we don't, some schools will give more athletic scholarships. No other benefit, we just agree on low costs to keep costs low.

When Ball State and LSU agree collectively (along with the other 343 D1 school) on the maximum scholarship they will give their athletes, it does not help Ball State in the slightest.  It doesn't result in smaller schools like Ball State get talent if a big school like LSU is really interested, or in winning as often as big schools like LSU, or having as many fans as big schools, or spending the same as big schools overall.  It *only* ensures that the big schools can keep their spending down to a small-school level when it comes to athletic scholarships.  The agreement between Ball State and LSU only helps LSU... and Alabama ... and Texas ... and all of the other big schools that LSU actually does compete against for talent and TV audience and wins, all of whom *would* spend more (and thus stay in competitive balance) if there were no cap.

Why are we letting LSU and Alabama collude in the name of Ball State?  Why are we letting the major schools collude on their level of compensation given to their prized athletes in the name of a Ball State program (and other MAC schools) that isn't competitive with BCS AQ schools, that doesn't generate fan interest because of the collusion, and that doesn't even use the "savings" from the collusion to pump up its football budget or coaching pay to try to be competitive with LSU?

The answer is that the NCAA has fooled you once again.  They tell you they are helping small schools stay competitive.  What they are really doing is helping big schools make money.  Lots of money.   LSU's numbers show it took in $43 million more than it spent on football.  A portion of that would have gone to athletes if LSU and Alabama had to compete for talent on the basis of compensation, but because of the false claim that LSU and Ball State currently enjoy competitive equity, LSU keeps its scholarship payments equal with Ball State and runs circles around them everywhere else.

It's time to stop treating competitive equity as something real and call the NCAA  what it is: a cartel designed to keep costs down without achieving any sort of competitive equity between Have and Have Not schools.  With respect to Competitive Equity, the NCAA is somewhere between a sham and a scam and the college athletes who are denied a market rate of compensation are the victims.  The rest of us are just the dupes who fall for it.