As a faculty member at Loyola Chicago, our admin has been feeding us lots of statistics about how breakout athletic success drives undergraduate applications. There’s something to the brand recognition element - especially for private universities - but is minor in the overall scheme of things. Athletic success will increase applications, which can allow you to admit larger classes and/or decrease your admit rate. This might allow you to move up a spot or two on US News college rankings and maybe, but probably not allow you to push tuition increases higher. Athletic success will generate more alumni giving, but a significant chunk of that will be earmarked back into the athletic department. You sell more T-shirts (and Harry Potter scarves), but a lot of that moneys goes back into the increased athletic dept budget
Loyola isn’t going to ride it’s men’s bball program into becoming Northwestern or U of C. It’s not going to bring enough revenue or donations to raise salaries, build research facilities, land larger grants, put up more dorms, etc. All of that is a long, complex process where athletics plays a small role.
I actually did some graduate study at Miami in the early-2000s, and that shit was as crazy as you’d imagine. Football players, and to a lesser extent baseball players did whatever they fuck they wanted and had athletic dept lackeys clean up after them.
But the football success didn’t drive the academic success. It was two consecutive transformative presidents - Edward Foote from 1981 to 2001 & Donna Shalala from 2001 to 2015 - that did the lift. Foote oversaw the rise of the football program, but he made massive investments in the student residential facilities and he leaned heavily into making UM a destination for the children of the elite across Latin America. Shalala raised and invested over $800m into the medical school and hospital, turning into a hugely profitable healthcare network. Combined, Foote and Shalala took the endowment from $40m to $1b.
Shalala, in particular, spent a lot of her political capital cleaning up after the Shapiro scandal and put the football program on a strict “pay your own way” budget. Clearly, president Julio Frenk has decided that the U needs to get back into the upper echelons of college football and is willing to pay to get there. I don’t quite understand what is driving that thinking. Given the history. I’d say the risks outweigh the rewards.
Edit: Looks like John Ruiz and pricing efforts to build a Coral Gables stadium along with the Mas brothers are driving this. A new stadium on the Coral Gables high school site is insane, but Frenk wasn’t around for the Shapiro days. He probably feels he can’t say bo to all this money being offered up.
