Deion.... hmmm...

Is CU really ready for Prime time?

I wrote a piece for the Colorado Sun about Colorado’s flagship higher ed institution.

It’s a new era of team hopping, paid players and zero loyalty. It’s not clear this is a game Colorado should play

Hope you’ll read the piece — and support the Colorado Sun. Independent journalism is the lifeblood of democracy.

A couple of other points as you consider sports and higher ed on this beautiful Saturday.

1. We need more transparency on athletic budgets, particularly as costs skyrocket. UCLA’s athletic department lost $62 million in 2021, and $100 million over the last three years. Anyone know how CU’s athletic department is doing??

2. The source and size of payouts to college football coaches is a massive mystery. CU paid out $9 million to break the five-year contract of their last football coach; Coach Prime’s guarantee is $30 million. 6 of CU’s last 7 football coaches have been fired. The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics argued last month that reforms are urgently needed:

Power Five programs are wasting staggering amounts of dollars in “dead money,” paying coaches not to coach, the FBS’s most vivid sign of financial dysfunction.

The amount of dead money payments in the FBS has tripled since the CFP began in fiscal 2015. In the past season and a half alone, through November 1 of this year, universities have fired 14 Power 5 head football coaches with combined contract buyouts of more than $150 million.

Budgets and spending are strategic choices — and higher ed has been avoiding the hard choices for too long. Betting the D1 Top 10 football stakes makes no more strategic sense today for Stanford than for CU. One of these institutions seems to realize this; Stanford just announced its new head coach will earn $2 mill per year — vs. Prime’s $6 mill, 5 year guarantee. $30 million would pay the full four-year tuition and room and board for hundreds of deserving and underappreciated Coloradans.

My bet is that CU will be rolling the football coaching dice again in another year or two. Next time, leadership and the Regents need to have a strategy in place for CU’s prime time — beyond football.