STOP ME BEFORE I SPEND MORE MONEY. That's Brad at the Sports Economist's impression of a comment by Myles Brand, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, rallying the troops.

Actually, the fact that intercollegiate athletics on almost every campus is losing money is not the real problem! Intercollegiate athletics adds value to the educational experience of those who participate. College is about lectures, textbooks and tests, but it is also about learning how to pursue excellence, to persist in the face of adversity, and to work in teams. College sports teaches these life skills as well as any other university activity, and probably better than the large majority. Even students who are not athletes gain from an athletics program. We know, from long-term research, that success in college is highly dependent on the identification of the student with his or her environment – that feeling part of something larger, not feeling alienated– increases persistence and graduation. A university should financially support those activities, including athletics, that have these types of education value.

Murray Sperber has considered a corollary proposition, that efforts to identify the university with unsuccessful athletics might well backfire, to the expense of the academic programs. He suggested that the erstwhile State University of New York at Buffalo might have hurt itself by becoming the doormat entrant of the Mid-American. And in DeKalb, the faculty was no less committed to doing well in the journals and in the classroom when the football team was going 0-for-the-nineties than it is with post-season play sometimes an option.

Mr. Brand's money quote:

Intercollegiate athletics does not have a sustainable business model.

Ford Motor just had to deal with that. Kresge, now K-Mart has had to deal with that. Baldwin Locomotive dealt with that.