Beyond Babedom

We're (way) over 40. Deal with it.

Stop Spending My Money on Sports

You think colleges are for providing higher education? Grow up. These days, their real job is to provide entertainment for the masses of sports fanatics and spend billions of dollars on coaches, stadiums and players. . . who, quite often, don’t graduate (or “pass” without ever having to go to class).

The numbers are ridiculous. Hundreds of millions are spent on new stadiums. The football coach at U.S.C. makes over $4 million a year while students have to spend from $42,600-$49,700 a year on tuition. And while Rutgers faces steep funding cuts,  their football coach, Greg Schiano, makes $2.03 million per year,  was handed $142,185 to fix up a parcel of land the college sold him, and then got a $800,000 interest-free loan for the construction of his house. . . most of which they’ll end up “forgiving”. They spend a whopping $55.56 MILLION a year on athletics.  WTF? Though I’m sure they spend at least that much on the music program. . . not.

Then they call me, as an alumna, and ask me to give money. Ask Greg Schiano, dammit!

Remember high school, you women over 40? Back then, the boys got all the new gymnastic equipment, the football players got the new uniforms, right? And the cheerleaders had to have cake sales and car washes to raise the money for their new uniforms. Half the students were girls, but we never got our fair share because they needed to reseed the baseball diamond or get new training equipment. Girls’ athletics? You got a mat and a short horse and you better be grateful. But it’s worse now. And the spending on college sports goes up and up and up every year.

Oh, they have their rationale – they claim college sports bring in money to the schools – but it’s pure BS. Not only do they not bring in extra cash, just about every major college athletic program has to be subsidized by the schools. At best, they break even. Well, not really. Can you call it breaking even when students can’t take the classes they want or kids simply can’t afford to attend?

Why the hell do we let sports fanatics spend our money like this? Yes – our money. Tax dollars fund state colleges but, even worse, millions and millions of tax dollars a year are given to private team owners to build new stadiums. What, they can’t invest their own money so they can earn millions more?

Hey, if you love your sports, that’s just great. Watch them to your heart’s content. But stop making me pay for them. I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2011 at 8:07 PM and is filed under My Pet Peeves, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Kariann says:

    Yep, where I live in Santa Clara, we are getting the 49ers. But we just donated supplies to Zachary’s school because of budget!

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