In case any unimportant "regular" college students were operating under the delusion that your university's boilerplate about how "Academics Come First" was actually a meaningful statement of values, it is now possible to quantify financially just how much more important athletes are than you, the unathletic plebeian.
A new report from the Delta Cost Project finds that NCAA schools (particularly big football schools) shower each athlete with far more dolla$$$ than each student, even though "only one in four institutions in the FBS generated more money than it spent in any given year between 2005 and 2010." From Inside Higher Ed:
According to the report, the growth in per-athlete athletic spending outpaced the growth in per-student academic spending over [2005-2010] in all subdivisions of Division I athletics. In general, the report found that Division I universities and colleges tended to spend roughly three to six times as much on athletics per athlete as on academics per student, with the ratio exceeding 12 times in the Southeastern Conference, home of the last seven NCAA national champions in football.
To be fair, how you gonna beat them Dawgs without spending no money to get them Gator boys some of them good pork chops? You gonna feed them boys a book? Haw. Maybe feed them Dawgs a book. Them tiny little Dawgs look like they been eatin some books.
[The full report. Photo: AP]