Billy Joe wrote:TCU's administration has fully supported TCU's football program. SMU's administration has not fully supported SMU's football program.
This is the key behind the divergence of the two programs. But there are reasons for it. SMU's faculty is much more resistant to committing more resources to football. Not so much the case at TCU. We have faculty dissenters too, but they are way in the minority and amount to lone voices crying in the wilderness. In fact, a great many TCU faculty are season ticket-holders. As a whole, they're much less contentious than SMU faculty. I wouldn't know first-hand, but this is what I'm told by former SMU faculty who now teach at TCU.
Faculty in general, at whatever institution, are largely clueless as to what a successful football program contributes to institutional success overall. They look at it strictly in terms of direct revenue, which is never a winner for football. As is the case at better than 90% of teams in the FBS subdivision (former Division I-A), TCU operates its football program at a loss. It's subsidized by the university, just like at SMU and Texas Tech and Houston and Okie State. Only a small handful of FBS programs operate in the black, and they're the UT's, OU's, Ohio State's, and Alabama's of this world. But that's hardly the norm.
What the dissenters consistently ignore is the indirect return from a successful football program, a return that is often difficult to quantify in terms of dollars. Successful football serves largely the same role for a university that advertising serves for a business. It broadcasts the university's name far and wide. It allows the opportunity for successful student admission recruiting in markets where the university's name would otherwise be little known or little regarded.
I'm not aware of any company in the land that can directly quantify the dollar return in sales on the investment in its advertising budget. Yet they all know it works, which is why they invest so heavily in advertising. This is the same reason so many colleges invest heavily in football success. They can't quantify the return, but they know it works and it's real. They know there's a direct cause and effect.
I've never understood why so many faculty, at whatever the institution, are so obtuse on this point. Even business school faculty -- and even marketing faculty -- often miss this. Sometimes I think they need to get out of the ivory tower of academia more often and immerse themselves in the real world.
