The question must be asked….

Donate To GopherHole

It's obvious that our administration despises football and men's basketball.

Everything is political these days. Especially at colleges.
 


I mean you have to take a step back and use your own mind...without what the media tells you.

No college administrator...or even a student...is going to be quoted in the media as saying they want FB and men's BB to fail. California rulers say they love the Pac-12...and they love the players so much that we need to ruin it for the real fans.
 

TwistingMyMelon said:
The University of Chicago plays football but at the DIII level. Here is a list of universities that are among the Top 30 in endowments who do not play D1 sports:

MIT (#5)
Emory (#9)
Washington (St. Louis)(#12)
Chicago (#13)
Johns Hopkins (#16) - they play D1 in a couple of sports but not football or basketball
NYU (#21)
Cal Tech (#23)
Williams (#24)
Amherst (#26)
Pomona (#28)
Rochester (#29)

Most of the others in the top 30 do not play FBS football.

Obviously, you can get people to donate to your institution without playing high level sports. I suspect that most of those who donate to universities because of their sports programs donate most of their money to the athletic programs.
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Let me underscore my point. Treating your team sports (football, basketball, volleyball, hockey, etc) poorly upsets more people than individual sports because there are more people to upset. The flipside is that when your team sports do well, you have more people who want to donate.

Academia doesn't understand why people donate. They mistakenly believe it is only about academic excellence in their field. Most of their fields have a smaller visibility than sports teams. Basic name recognition is crucial to donation. UMN has done a wonderful job getting their name recognized... for doing unethical, morally questionable, and even criminal behaviors... both academically and athletically. It's no wonder people don't want to come to UMN for anything because all they hear is negative, in big and small stories. They try to push positive academic stories, but because they are so small, realtively speaking, most people forget about them because they don't impact their lives in the short term.

For good or bad, sports, especially team sports, foster greater inclusion and sense of community because they have immediately visible results. Academic results coming from academic excellence are not immediate results. They might be longer lasting, but don't move masses of people to support a school the way sports does.

The idealism of Academia doesn't put a good feeling in the hearts of people on a bad day at work. It doesn't make a kid dream that there might bigger opportunities available to them. Those are the things non-school connected people relate to.

People don't donate en masse to a school because that school wrote new code for a computer operating system or created a new method for cardiovascular surgery. They need a more visible reason, sports is that reason.
 


Academics don't bring in Billions of TV dollars that major sports do. Some of that supports academics but a lot of academia don't see it that way.
 

Sports get alumni back to campus and keeps them connected that way. I'm not sure how connected I'd be to the U if it weren't for attending games and homecoming activities. I'd probably still donate, but that's not certain. The last time I was down there for something purely academic was a research awards luncheon where I was honored, which was pre-COVID.

The better the sports performance, the better that kind of alumni connection.
 

bga1 said:
#2 is a myth. He would have been interested
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This is a myth. Musselman was not and will not be interested. Plus Arkansas is a better job in every way compared to MN.
 
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oldman said:
Academics don't bring in Billions of TV dollars that major sports do. Some of that supports academics but a lot of academia don't see it that way.
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Again, take a look at how much money the Big Ten makes off of research. It is more than TV.

There is a reason that despite other conferences winning more, the Big Ten is the richest. They have the combo platter of rich athletics and even richer academics. The problem is they don't seem to like to get along. It is not just here, it is all over the place and has been going on for a while. The last Gophers Rose Bowl bid was because the academics at Ohio State voted against accepting the bid because they didn't like Ohio States rep as a football school.
 



TwistingMyMelon said:
Interesting questions. I would say that the evidence certainly points to us caring more about basketball than they do.

Of course, they may also be, relatively speaking, broke. Remember, it wasn't that long ago (2020) that the athletic department cut 4 men's sports teams and reported a revenue loss of $75 million.

Football appears to be a different matter. They pay Fleck well and appear more willing to invest in that program. Given hockey's cultural importance to the state, the presence of multiple intra-state rivals, and the fact that they can maintain their status as a big fish in a small pond in that sport they likely will continue to invest there.

If Ben Johnson has another losing season, he should by all rights be fired. But, will they spend the money to get an established coach with a demonstrable track record like Penn State (another school that historically didn't seem to care much about basketball) just did? I can't rule that out but I have no confidence that they will.

I wouldn't get too wrapped up in the theory that the sad state of basketball is solely the responsibility of a cabal of insidious academic elites (I know you love a good conspiracy theory). I've lived in this state for a little over 20 years now and I haven't met that many people in my daily life who follow Gopher basketball (although I detected a stronger interest in Tubby's earlier years).
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It's not a conspiracy theory if it's true.
 


Off-GridTNgopher said:
The u would rather bump shoulders with the academia elites of the world..... Thats all they care about...
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Well, it is a major educational and research university and economic engine for the state, which is why it exists at all. So there’s that pesky detail.
 

Bobek said:
Well, it is a major educational and research university and economic engine for the state, which is why it exists at all. So there’s that pesky detail.
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"Look at the classism inherent in the system!"
 



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