The ACC and ESPN recently announced a 20 year agreement to establish a sports network.

Twenty years is a long time.  If UNC is not around in 2036, does it still have the obligation to field a football team?  Can Ron Stutts be the quarterback?

Lew Margolis

Lew Margolis

Let’s listen to the claimed benefits described during the announcement:

  • Produce content of the highest order for millions of fans to entertain and entrance
  • Create value for distributors
  • Provide an effective platform for advertisers
  • Secure financial benefit for ESPN and the ACC
  • Shine a spotlight on thousands of student-athletes

 

What I did not hear was how this advances the mission of UNC to serve as a center of research, scholarship, and creativity.  A sad omission given that ACC chancellors were in the room for the announcement.

Will the millions of dollars that flow to athletics slow the six percent decline in per-student academic spending?  Or the four percent increase in athletic spending over the past five years at UNC as reported by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics?

A broadcast network stimulates an insatiable demand for content to feed the appetites of millions of subscribers.  Will athletes be subjected to schedules that are even more disruptive of achieving academic goals than the current impositions?  And, I might add, without fair compensation for the value that ESPN is purchasing.

Who will monitor and be accountable for the inevitable compromises in academic integrity?

For their millions dollars, ESPN’s advertisers are going to insist on a product that produces not just entertainment, but championships.

UNC is already a champion in academic-athletic scandals.  But, one must wonder if countless, intrusive regulations of the lives of athletes and faculty will be enough to withstand the forces to recruit and commit athletes instead of students.

 

— Lew Margolis

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