Is Brian Kelly’s $95 million contract worth it? One might think that it’s not, especially after early October’s 40-13 spanking against Tennessee.
Questions surrounding LSU’s spending habits in the athletics department have been on the minds and Twitter accounts of some LSU faculty and students for a while, at least since the university decided to spend $28 million dollars renovating its football and operations center in summer 2019. The school’s priorities seem out of whack, so the thought goes, if it’s spending tens of millions of dollars on sports while key academic buildings like the library are under daily threat of water and flood damage.
But LSU’s football spending habits are much more complicated than they may initially seem. The success of the university’s various sports teams has immediate effects on university enrollment and even on local and state economies. What’s more, LSU football in particular is an enormous cash grab for the university, which is the only Southeastern Conference school to bring in more money in sports donations than academic ones.
According to a 2018 report by The Advocate, the LSU football program gross revenue was a jaw-dropping $86 million; its profit was $56 million.
Compare this to men’s basketball, which profited roughly $1.6 million, or to baseball, which profited a comparatively small amount of approximately $569,000 in the same year. All other sports teams – gymnastics, softball, women’s basketball, track and field – were in the red.
A winning football team also has a positive effect on enrollment. This is known as the “Flutie Effect.” In 1984, Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie threw a last-second touchdown pass to miraculously win against the University of Miami. Just two years later, applications to Boston College jumped by 30%, making the school a prime destination for students looking for a classic “college experience.”
This phenomenon has been well documented in students and articles since then. In 2007, some community colleges started investing in new sports programs to attract new students, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Such attempts had a positive impact on student morale and enrollment.
In a 2012 American Freshman National Norms survey, UCLA researchers found that, along with college affordability and job prospects post-college, about 40% of new students indicated that social life was a key concern when deciding which school to attend.
At LSU, the football program has its own social gravitational pull, taking over the entire campus on game days, bringing in students and fans from across the state and beyond.
Outside of the immediate context of the university, the football program also has positive effects on the entire city of Baton Rouge. According to 2020 reporting from The Reveille, Loren Scott, a former chairman of LSU’s Department of Economics, estimated that LSU fans from outside of Baton Rouge spent a collective $27.4 million around the city during the 2001 season. In an updated 2013 survey, he found that that figure had spiked to $47.7 million.
Scott also estimated that, across all LSU athletics programs, $397.5 million in sales were generated, as well as $119.7 million in household earnings and almost 4,000 jobs.
And in its 2019 national championship winning season, LSU football brought in $92 million in revenue, including $36.3 million in ticket sales, bringing its annual profit to $56.6 million.
These figures suggest that a winning football program is good for all of LSU, not just the athletics department or Brian Kelly. It brings in money for just about everyone – including businesses across the Baton Rouge community.
This doesn’t mean that LSU has its priorities straight all the time. Certainly, it’s frustrating for faculty, graduate and undergraduate students alike to have to walk into a decrepit library every day; in fact, it borders on embarrassment. It’s also frustrating when we have an immense backlog of deferred maintenance in buildings across campus, which is similarly harmful to campus morale.
But the reality is that a lot of these problems have little to do with the athletics department in general or the football program and Kelly in particular. Instead, the problems lie in the backwards bureaucratic monstrosity that is the Tiger Athletics Foundation and the Louisiana legislature.
The Tiger Athletics Foundation, for instance, isn’t allowed to share funds with the separate LSU Foundation, which is responsible for managing academic donations. Instead, TAF is only allowed to provide its collected funds to the Athletics Department alone, a policy enforced by current athletic director Scott Woodward.
Perhaps this policy makes sense on paper, but its utility runs out when, as pointed out in a 2021 column in The Reveille, TAF began to use its money to subsidize the lawsuits against the university over the Title IX violations brought up under former football head coach Ed Orgeron.
Similarly, the state legislature is responsible for determining the budget for essentials like deferred maintenance – which, again, is fine when done reasonably. But currently, it only provides a $2-3 million annual budget for such repairs, a measly sum in the face of its $604 million total.
As things stand now, though, with the often head-scratching policy, it’s best to give Kelly a bit more time to demonstrate his worth. If LSU keeps suffering blowouts like it did against Tennessee, the worth of Kelly’s role and salary should be reevaluated. At that point, members of the LSU community will have a better understanding of his effect on student morale and enrollment.
One thing that would undoubtedly help, though, is for Kelly to reprioritize his donation habits. Instead of giving $1 million to further update the state-of-the-art athletics facilities, perhaps he could give a bit to help fix the library or other buildings – a financial gift like that would undoubtedly boost his clout among the people who make up the heart and soul of LSU: not its administrators or its athletics coaches, but its teachers and students.
Benjamin Haines is a 24-year-old history graduate student from Shreveport.
