Des Moines Register
05-15-07
Pollard: Financial disclosure needed
By JANE NORMAN
Register WASHINGTON BUREAU
Washington, D.C. - College athletics has a "huge need" for more financial
disclosure to the public as sports come closer to resembling big business, the
Iowa State athletic director told members of the Knight Commission on
Intercollegiate Athletics on Monday.
"What's happened is we've become a publicly held company," Jamie Pollard
said. "Any publicly held company has a lot of financial reporting, and a lot of
restrictions on how they account for things and what they tell those shareholders,
and that's where we've failed miserably."
College athletics in the past was akin to a privately held company with the
majority shareholder the state or the college president, he said.
But now with ticket sales or donations providing revenue rather than the state,
"one day we woke up and we weren't the majority shareholders any more," said
Pollard, who has pushed to improve Iowa State's financial base and ticket sales
since he was hired in September 2005.
The non-profit Knight Commission, formed in 1989 in response to a series of
college sports scandals, examines issues in college sports and makes
recommendations.
One effort has been to try to find a way to compile more complete financial data
as athletic expenditures among Division I universities grow at a rate three or four
times faster than overall university spending.
Pollard said full information on revenues and expenses of big-time college sports
must to be shared with the public, as well as top college officials, so that fans
better understand what's going on with salaries and more.
"I don't know a president in the country that's going to be able to stop the train
that we've created by allowing the market to dictate what happens in college
athletics," said Pollard, who is also a certified public accountant and founded and
operated for five years a research company that provided financial information on
athletics to colleges.
"The only way it ultimately will change is if the people invested in the company the public - have the data and know what they're really invested in."
At Iowa State, "we are a have- not in the league we're in," he said of the Big 12
Conference. But fans "have the same or more passion for 'maybe we need a new
athletic director, maybe we need a new basketball coach, maybe we need a new
football coach, maybe we need a new president,' " he said.
Fans have to "understand what we have to do if they really want us to be in that
realm, or someday we're going to wake up and say, well then, some institutions
can't operate in that environment," Pollard said.
Data presented at the meeting showed that among the "Football Bowl"
subdivision of Division I colleges, formerly known as I-A, 78.4 percent of revenue
during the 2004-05 school year came from ticket sales, radio and television
receipts, and alumni and booster contributions.
The rest of the money came from student fees allocated to athletics, institutional
support and government support.