disaster for BYU.
(I posted this a while back last time I saw people discussing how the church should get rid of football. I've updated it a bit and it is relevant to today's discussion on the board).
A successful athletics program, particularly in football, is one of the best ways for a university to gain name recognition. Boise State's president has spoken of this often and said that the football program's success has done more for the university than anything else in terms of increasing name recognition. The football program at boise state took a small commuter school and made it a national name. National name recognition enhances the value of a graduate’s degree, increases donations to the university and improves the quality of applicants. 20 years ago if a manager saw someone had a degree from boise state, they might think that it was a community college. Now almost everyone has heard of them.
My own employer, Washington University in St. Louis, has struggled with the opposite problem. US News ranks Wash U as the #18 school in the country, ahead of Cal Berkely and the University of Michigan. Wash U’s medical school is ranked #7, ahead of Yale and Cornell. 22 nobel laureates have come through Wash U. As you’d imagine, the university has a fantastic reputation in academia and its graduates do very well in pursuing careers in academics or medicine, but outside of those areas, many graduates express frustration at the University's lack of name recognition among everyday employers, many of whom hear the name Washington University in St. Louis and assume it is some kind of St. Louis based community college. If you’re a mid level recruiter at a large company, you have almost certainly heard of Duke and Notre Dame, but there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Wash U in St. Louis. A big reason for Wash U’s lack of name recognition outside of academia is that they field division III athletics programs. I talk to many graduates who are frustrated by how many people have never heard of their Alma Mater and how little weight their degree has OUTSIDE of academics and medicine.
The success of BYU’s football program is a large reason why a little known Mormon school gained national name recognition. It grants a degree of normalcy to a religious university that is often viewed as a “weird Mormon school.” Eliminate football and the University would almost certainly slowly lose a portion of its name recognition which would cheapen the degrees of its graduates.
The reason for the college football “arms race” is that the presidents of large universities know that successful athletics can be an essential part of a university's success. They are not idiots. National name recognition is one of the most important assets a university can have.
Now of course I realize that athletics are not the only way to gain such recognition. Many universities (including some of the ones I’ve named) have not gained their reputation primarily through athletics. What I am saying is that a successful football program is ONE of the ways a university can do so. For BYU, it is probably the most important one given its focus on undergraduate education and relatively limited research. Eliminating football would be a disaster for the university.
Instead of thinking that the presidents of the majority of America's best universities are evil money seekers for investing so much money in football, BYU should learn something from them. They are making an investment that pays dividends for the university.