The Magical Power of Football

The writer is a current president

I once told a friend I was going to write a book entitled “The Magical Power of Football.” The book would explore why intercollegiate football seems to lead some among of us presidents  to make decisions that defy logic. 

As president, you become pretty good at saying some version of “that dog won’t hunt” when pitched an idea that you know from experience will not live up to the breathless assertions of success, fame, glory, and endless revenue that will come flowing in once you approve the plan. 

You know that feeling—the one you get when people making a pitch imply that you and only you stand between their idea and new levels of success and institutional greatness. 

And yet, some presidents—even smart, rational people trained in research and who usually make data-informed decisions—can get carried away by what are, let’s face it, magical assertions. 

Why would the leader of a university whose enrollment is in a sharp and sustained decline pay a football coach several times the salary of the lowest paid coach in the league, even when at the same time cutting its institutional budget?  

Why do presidents announce new facilities and expensive renovations for existing ones even while eliminating academic departments and firing tenured professors? Why do they sign coaches to long-term contracts to then buy them out for millions of dollars? 

One online definition of magic mentions things “wonderful and exciting” driven by “mysterious or supernatural forces.” Not to go all first-year student-y, but Wikipedia defines “high magic,” also known as theurgy and or ritual magic, as “more complex, involving lengthy and detailed rituals as well as sophisticated, sometimes expensive, paraphernalia.” What does that sound like to you?  

For presidents who don their school colors from head to toe, as I do every home game Saturday, believing in the magical power of football springs from a couple of sources. 

Higher ed is an industry without clear markers of prestige, aside, say, from being in the Ivy League, or maybe membership in the Association of American Universities—although no one outside of academia knows or cares what the latter is. 

If you have little hope of climbing Carnegie categories or ascending the rankings, the football stadium scoreboard makes clear which school won, something nearly impossible to ascertain for the rest of higher education.  

For the most part I’m not talking about the powerhouses of the gridiron. I’m talking about regional universities, those in the so-called Group of 5, the ones Peyton Manning once referred to as “directional schools,” where large football expenditures are funded primarily through student fees and by reallocating general operating funds to athletics. Those schools get positive football press coverage even if their overall graduation rates are lower than their teams’ average points scored per game.

Another source of the reliance on magic, which stems from the first source, comes from pressure applied by a combination of boosters and university trustees. Some of the latter love football (I do, too) and maybe some of them played football at their alma mater, and they are, impossible to forget, your bosses. 

What’s a president who hesitates to emulate these “big schools” to do when pressured to spend like they do? After all, at that moment you are the only thing standing between new levels of prestige and institutional greatness. 

Do the students care? Are most of them really attending games? While it’s true that many athletics programs generate some level of school spirit and serve as the front porch of the university, it’s also the case that most students file out of the stadium by the end of the first half. Unless you have a really good marching band; then they’ll leave at the beginning of the third quarter. 

And then there’s this: football at the Football Bowl Subdivision level costs a shitload of money (I once worked with a CFO who defined “shitload” as “two buttloads”).

The truth is, I continue to drink the magic elixir myself, even while wrestling with whether to steer our university away from this arms race. I haven’t done so, honestly, because all I would do over the next two years or so is defend this decision, assuming, of course, that I lasted two years after making the move. 

That, and I really do enjoy watching football games.