How The NCCA Turns Financial Profit Into A Loss – From VICE Sports

Updated: April 23, 2015

VICE Sports just published an article about the recently released, independent report that sheds light on the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s decision to cut its football team. In “Here’s How The NCAA’s Black Magic Accounting Turns Profit Into Loss,” Aaron Gordon details the truly bizarre rules that make profit for the university appear to be a loss for the athletic department, explaining how most athletic departments can claim poor in the age of billion-dollar TV contracts.

Read it here: https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/heres-how-the-ncaas-black-magic-accounting-turns-profit-into-loss

Aaron Gordon writes, “This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a cost is; the university is simply paying itself. Assuming the scholarship athletes aren’t taking a non-athlete’s place (which they aren’t at UAB, since it’s trying to grow the student body), then the marginal cost of each additional athlete is close to zero. The school will always come out even since it’s paying itself.”

NCAA