 "Photo: By Stephen Moccia/The Ram")
At first thought, the news can be staggering.
So you’re telling me that the g—d— men’s basketball team, which just finished the season 2-26, which hasn’t won a conference home game since 2008, which we, the students, already pay $2.5 million a year to support, is getting a $700,000 increase in its funding? And this is after Fordham stopped hiring new professors and staff and tuition still went up almost three grand, and it’s probably going up more next year? And I’m supposed to be happy about this?
Yes. This 30-percent increase in funding for the basketball team is the best money this school will ever spend, but first, let’s make sure we all understand how much money we’re talking about.
Despite all the attention paid this year to the 24-hour library zone being limited, the significant but mostly invisible hiring freeze had a much larger negative effect on students. Just think about the number of electives you had to choose from this year. I know I felt squeezed, not to mention that all of my upper level major classes are overflowing. There literally are not enough seats in my microeconomics class, and this makes sense because several students had to be forced in above capacity by the dean.
Regardless if the hiring freeze has been lifted for next year, think about how many teachers could be hired with $700,000. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, post-secondary teachers earn an average of $58,000 per year, meaning Fordham could hire roughly 12 teachers with the new basketball money. Of course, that number is significantly larger if we think instead in terms of the $5 million Fordham will spend on men and women’s basketball next year. If Fordham decided to give up basketball altogether, it could hire almost 90 new teachers, or even 50 well regarded professors for $100,000 each.
It is important also to remember that Fordham generates only a small amount of revenue from its basketball program, much less than $500,000 even in a conservative estimate.
There is no question that hiring 50 extremely well qualified professors would be beneficial to students. So to support my claim that Fordham should spend this incredible sum on basketball instead, I need to justify it from a student’s perspective.
Right now, graduating from Fordham earns us a degree that can land you a job in New York City, provided you are an accountant. If you want to do something else, or if you want to go somewhere else, you’re on your own. The questions, then, are how to increase the value of our degrees, and how to increase Fordham’s name recognition. The answer to both questions is basketball.
Think of the $3.2 million the University will spend on men’s basketball next year (the $1.8 million for women’s basketball is utterly useless) as a nationwide advertising campaign combined with a monumental effort at developing school pride and identity.
Xavier University has had an excellent men’s basketball program recently, spending roughly $4 million per year, and actually taking in $8 million in revenue, according to U.S. Department of Education reports. For the 2008-2009 season, Xavier was on national television (CBS or ESPN) 13 times before the NCAA tournament, where the team played three games, all on CBS. That year, over 20 million people watched Xavier over the course of the tournament, according to Nielsen’s averages. Regular season games usually average about one million viewers, so we can add about 13 million on top, for a total of 33 million.
Now I understand that this is not 33 million different people necessarily, but nine million households did tune in to watch Xavier play Pittsburgh in the quarterfinals. Of course, you say, couldn’t Fordham achieve similar results by simply paying for television commercials? Wouldn’t that remove the very distinct possibility that Fordham will continue to play terrible basketball and thus never get on television?
That logic is correct, but think about the differences between the two. A commercial is 30 seconds long, and is often ignored or at least viewed passively.
A basketball game, on the other hand, is over two hours long, and is often exciting. The announcers constantly say “Fordham,” Fordham is written all over the television screen, the players and their uniforms are on the screen and the commentators often talk a bit about the actual school during the course of the game. People start to relate to the team, and by extension, the University. As Fordham will always be an underdog in a televised game, viewers may sympathize with the team, even root for it and maybe develop a connection.
The point is, when they hear “Fordham,” instead of saying, “What’s Fordham?” they will say, “Oh yeah, Fordham, I watched them play North Carolina the other day, they really played tough down the stretch.”
In other words, basketball is a way for a school to raise its prestige and develop, for lack of a better term, its brand. Once high school kids have heard of your school, then they start to apply to it, which means the school can be more selective, and other people will say, “Wow, there’s a lot of smart people at Fordham, it must be a good school!”
This may sound ridiculous, but many universities have taken this route. Schools like Georgetown, Boston College and Villanova all significantly improved their profiles through sports while Fordham cut its football program and suffocated basketball. You still, however, may have a nagging feeling that a school is not supposed to sell itself – it is supposed to educate. Well let me tell you something. You do not pay $200,000 for an education. You can get the same education for much less. You pay $200,000 now because you want it to pay off in the future.
In a way, the cheesy advertisements that went up all over MetroNorth last fall were close to getting it right. They read, “Fordham: It’s Not a Game; It’s Basketball.” What they should have said is: “It’s Not a Game; It’s Branding.”
Robert Pergament, FCRH ’10, is an English and economics major from Garden City, N.Y.
FC JJ Smith III MD