My brother is a Sport Management major at the University of Florida, so I pretty much bring up any crazy idea about the business side of sports to him.  I also frequently ask him exactly what Title IX is, stuff like that.  Recently, I found a link from Bill Simmons concerning a 'roundtable discussion' of the place of sport at Holy Cross (Simmons is an alum, as he frequently mentions in his column).  I'd usually bug my bro with this kind of thing on AIM while he's not paying attention in class (and I'm, uh, taking it easy at work), but he wasn't online this time.  I thought it could be an interesting conversation starter to include my email and his reply below.

By no means was this an exhausting intellectual excercise, but I hope including others in our somewhat regular conversations will serve to enlighten the public as to what common misconceptions there are about the NCAA and sports business in general, and also allow all of us to have a  greater understanding of why certain things about the sports we love are the way they are.

Here's the link that spurred this discussion:

http://www.holycross.edu/departments/publicaffairs/hcm/winter08/features/feature1.html

I'll also note that I didn't orinigally intend for this to be published, so the discussion is a little rough and I got some facts wrong in trying to give my bro some background when I emailed him.  I also was pretty angry at the attitudes of some of the people in the article, so it's probably somewhat slanted against the school, but hey it's my opinion.  I've taken some liberties editing the original emails, but tried to keep the message.  Please refer to the Wikipedia article linked below for the real facts about a College I wouldn't know existed if it wasn't for Bill Simmons...

ME:

A lot of the people in this thing made me angry on different 
levels, but I thought it was important to see what different 
people think about sports at colleges, even though I dont agree 
with all of it.  I also think they probably had misconceptions.
 
College of the Holy Cross is somewhere up by Boston I think, Bill 
Simmons ESPN writer went there, they used to be fairly prominent 
in Division 1, even won National Titles in Mens Basketball and 
stuff.

[GOOSE NOTES: I since looked up Wikipedia and found out they won 1 NCAA basketball championship, and one College World Series- the only team from the Northeast to ever win the CWS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_of_the_holy_cross#Athletics]
 
Now they are just another snobby private school that is stuck 
between trying to appease older alumni who'd like a return to 
athletic prominence (and for the school to issue football 
scholarships) and newer alumni/current students who (I'd say 
obviously) don't care as much about the athletic tradition (If 
they did, I'd argue, they'd have gone to BC or somewhere else).  
Old Celtic greats like Bob Cousy went there.  Now they just 
complain about the same old mid-major stuff (no one will play us 
because we're too good) for basketball, and are stuck between not 
caring and caring.  I'm not sure if this is something you guys 
talk about in class, and I don't really know the answer, though 
I'm inclined to say they are being dumb and could benefit by 
stepping up the athletics- at least for the national exposure 
beyond being a 13 seed in someone's NCAA bracket.

(Don't Tase Me) BRO:

Sounds like they are doing everything possible to still act like they are all about
academics and do not want to compromise anything for athletics.  
In this way they are already benefiting from having articles like
this to say &we're better than you because we care about
academics.&  I guess its all really a presigue thing.  Long story
short, there really is no answer, it depends on what they are
really looking for.  Some of the things they were saying about
equal scholarships for mens and womens is not completely accurate,
unless that is a personal goal of the school to uphold all 3
prongs of the title IX test (that would be direct proportionality,
the other 2 are history of improvement and upholding the needs and
desires of the underrepresented sex). I'm a big supporter of
buffing up your athletics to gain exposure, the whole reason
anybody knows that xavier is a school.  By the way success in
sports DOES relate to more donations from alumni, i dont know what
they were basing that statement on, but they are full of [uh, Jim Tressel's Sweater Vest collection ].  
all the figures i saw in the NCAA class and sport administration
class i took showed a correlation between success and donations.  
Some of the ways donations are recorded are kind of messed up in
universities, and the atheltics program ising credited for a large
sum of the money that they bring in because the donations are not
recorded as being related to athletics.  The arguements they made
seemed pretty standard for the whole athletics v. academics
arguement.  The whole thing about athletes changing their schedule
for practice was dumb.  I know alot of people that plan their
school schedule around a work schedule, or other things not
related to academics at all.  Like in Gainesville if you serve at
most restaurants you have to have a daytime shift during the week,
which causes you to take at least one day off a week of school.  
Anyway, I would say athletics is not something that they want to
gain exposure from, and almost benefit from being able to complain
about it.

In case you're curious about some of the other topics mentioned in this article, good starting points include:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_ix

http://ope.ed.gov/athletics/search.asp

http://www.tbo.com/sports/gators/MGBC6Q5M81F.html

http://www.tboblogs.com/index.php/sports/comments/breaking-down-the-bonuses/

http://www.tboblogs.com/index.php/sports/comments/the-florida-gator/