It turns out that even if you’re inept at what you do, you can still make pretty good money if you don’t have to pay the labor.
The NCAA recorded a nearly $61 million surplus for its 2013 fiscal year, according to an audited financial statement the association released Thursday.
While the surplus is smaller than those the association had in each of its two previous years, this is third consecutive year in which the annual surplus has exceeded $60 million. This increased the NCAA’s year-end net assets to more than $627 million, just less than double where they stood at the end of its 2007 fiscal year.
Among the NCAA’s more than $589 million in unrestricted assets is an endowment fund that had grown to more than $326 million as of the end of its 2013 fiscal year, Aug. 31. The fund grew by more than $44 million in 2013, its greatest one-year increase since it was established in 2004.
Mark Emmert probably needs a raise.
Get The Picture 
All the more to pay the O’Bannon settlement with.
LikeLike
Beat me to it… Another idea; let’s use it to help less fortunate students go to college without owing a mountain of loan debt? Too simple, I know…
LikeLike
“Mark Emmert probably needs a raise.”
Gotta get that surplus down somehow.
LikeLike
I’ve been watching a 24 hour news channel I won’t name but I’m pretty sure that insisting that making the job creators pay the takers is communism. I think we should look to the NFL to understand why only the free market can work. In the NFL they don’t allow unions so they don’t have negotiate wages or other conditions of employment. A team can also pay as much as they want to their team without any outside interference. If a team wins the Super Bowl they get the first pick in the draft because they’ve earned it and the easiest schedule for the same reason. It is because winning is incentivized and the losers are punished that it is so successful. Especially where the teams decide how much they will spend on labor. If for example they had a labor union and gave the worst team the first pick and easiest schedule or if they had an arbitrary “salary cap” it would obviously be doomed to fail.
LikeLike
That’s a cute straw man argument you made Derek.
You should shop that with MSNBC and see if you can get a gig.
LikeLike
There is a salary cap in the nfl and there is a union, the nfl players association. There is revenue sharing so that the revenue shared to the jags is the same as the Seahawks. There isa rookie salary structure applicable to all teams and rookies. Your assumptions are incorrect.
LikeLike
So you are trying to tell me that the most successful professional sports organization the world has ever known is based upon the principles of socialism? Redistribution of money from the successful to the unsuccessful? Evil unions? Surely you jest! This couldn’t possibly be a successful and profitable model can it? If I were to accept this, I’d have to change everything that I believe to be true. I might have to, you know, think, God forbid!
Maybe the NFL survives this model because most people really are wired to win and will try to succeed for the rewards of achievement that transcend money. Maybe money is one thing, but not the ONLY thing. Maybe people aren’t inherently evil, parasitic bums but decent hard working people who want to succeed where there is opportunity for success. Of course, one thing you have to decide is that we are all in this together and that we are all entitled to the same opportunities as everyone else irrespective of where we started from.
So it confuses me that the NFL can agree to this arrangement when everyone knows that the Browns are just lazy takers who blow their redistributed money on useless things like Tim Couch, right?
LikeLike
It’s sad that you think you’ve made a point here.
LikeLike
What is sad is that you think dismissal is an argument. If you think that the NFL argument is a “straw man” support it rhetorically. Clearly, the NFL is the most socialistic organization known to man, yet it works and works very well. All I am suggesting is that the Ayn Rand construction of the way things are supposed to work is empirically wrong. I would also freely admit that the Marxist construction is also very, very wrong. People won’t work for the benefit of strangers to any degree that will create wealth and support a society of any number. Likewise, believing that we can push all the wealth to the top and that the beneficiaries won’t then use their wealth to make sure that the rules are written to entrench their own selfish interests at the expense of the not yet rich is also naive. The truth lies somewhere in between these useless ideologies that don’t reflect or respect the human condition as we actually find it.
LikeLike
Your straw man is “a 24 hour news channel I won’t name but I’m pretty sure that insisting that making the job creators pay the takers is communism.” Nobody said that, thus it’s a….straw man.
Your grasp on “socialism” and your attempt to compare it to the NFL is nonsensical. An organization controlled by 32 billionaires that employs hundreds and compensates them in millions is anything but “socialism”.
You seem to conflate competition with socialism. The NFL owners makes rules to make the league competitive and for the purpose of…..making more money. Just like when the UFC outlawed eye gouges and groin kicks, it wasn’t “socialism”. The owners (greedy capitalist) thought they could make…. more money. Which is sorta the inverse of socialism.
The rest of your post seems to be the scattered thoughts from a freshman bull session and aren’t worth addressing.
BTW
“Clearly, the NFL is the most socialistic organization known to man, yet it works and works very well”
No. Not even close.
LikeLike
To be fair, the Browns were obviously just doing all of this for the TM licencing boon they’re getting for the upcoming Draft Day film.
LikeLike
it’s not socialism. It’s more like a partnership. The teams in the NFL compete with each other, not as capitalists, but as partners/joint venturers. If, say, the New York Giants dominated everything due to superior access to money, advertisers, endorsements, etc., what happens? Some teams in small markets fail. The NFL needs teams in each separate market to be competitive, so they “level the playing field” enough that everyone makes oodles of cash. It’s a monopoly disguised as a bunch of competitors. It isn’t a communist utopia, and it certainly isn’t a model for anything except other monopolies.
LikeLike
Some would argue that citizens of a nation have entered into a social contract similar to a partnership where we all have a vested interest in each other’s success.
LikeLike
Yes. Some would. They are called fascists.
LikeLike
You may want to read a dictionary or a book. I’m not sure the fascists in nazi Germany were exactly inclusive but maybe I missed the part where they accepted the Jews and the blacks and the gypsies and the homosexuals and so on. I kinda think you might be full of shit.
On your suggestion that rich people trying to make more money can’t be socialist in their approach is equally dumb. They have found that they individually make more if they raise the weakest. This is no different than concluding that you should care about whether a kid in south atlanta avoids prison. Why? It’s better for you if he’s productive. The nfl is a community like any other. The rules can work well irrespective of the number if participants IF you recognize that we have a stake in you not being stupid. You can’t say I haven’t tried.
LikeLike
“You may want to read a dictionary or a book. I’m not sure the fascists in nazi…”
– The national SOCIALIST in Germany defined non-Aryans as non-citizens. Presto, Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, etc. are no longer worthy of any protection of the state. Thus the Nazi or the Bolshevik could speak about helping a comrade one day and the next annihilate the same person as an “enemy” because a person’s value was defined by the state, Your ignorance can be forgiven. When you get to 10th grade, you’ll take World History and much of this will be explained
“On your suggestion that rich people trying to make more money can’t be socialist in their approach is equally dumb”
You ought to invest in a copy of “Socialism for Dummies”. Socialism is the government owning or controlling the means of production. Billionaires writing rules for a business to make even more money is capitalism.
“The rules can work well irrespective of the number if participants IF you recognize that we have a stake in you not being stupid”
Nice straw man, Capone. No body is arguing for anarchy. At least outside your Model UN Club.
Here’s some free advice: Go read “Siddartha” and invest in a Che Guavera shirt. Trust me, it’ll impress your friends,
LikeLike
some would, who havent read the Constitution. That pretty much defines the social contract between citizens and the government. Don’t let facts get in the way of your utopian feelings, though.
LikeLike
keep chewing on those lead based paint chips. It sounds as though you’re having a spectacular trip through an alternate reality.
LikeLike
“insisting that making the job creators pay the takers is communism”
In a whole new paradigm of stupid, Fox Business Network thinks that’s the subversive Leftist Muppet line of movies, not the NFL
http://www.theguardian.com/film/shortcuts/2011/dec/06/muppet-movies-communist-plots-revealed
LikeLike
Seriously, people? You don’t know sarcasm when you read it?
Well done, Derek.
LikeLike
Greg McGarity read this article and is sporting a boner the size of Winterville.
LikeLike
Mike Adams approves this message.
LikeLike
Emmert will be getting a raise, will likely dip out of the NCAA offices right ahead of a judgement in these lawsuits and will land in a cushy ivy league presidents role with a nice retirement package.
LikeLike
I wish my Son’s College Education was free.
LikeLike
You’d wish for more if he were a star football player.
LikeLike
I doubt that.
LikeLike
The senator makes an important distinction here: the walk on/2 star for whom PTC DAWG is probably right, and the pre-professional five star who’s autograph is worth a lot of money, and who by and large is driving the actual value that leads to Emmert’s $2.0 million salary.
LikeLike
You know, it just dawned on me to wonder why the NCAA complains about being so understaffed when it’s sitting on all that cash.
LikeLike
Most professional sports organizations (and I don’t care what they say, the NCAA is a professional sports business) have a ridiculously small number of employees compared to the gross and nets profits and the sales value of the franchise. Look at pro football as an example. You have the owner, the team president, the GM and some assistant GM types plus secretarial staff–that’s the front office. Then you have the HC and his assistants, trainers, equipment guys and assorted flunkies around the locker room. You might have a doc or 2 but those guys aren’t full-time. Finally you have the players, including the taxi squad that only amounts to about 55 or so guys. Add all that up and you have under 100 people. Yet they run a franchise that is worth about $650 Mil on the open market. Times 32 that’s 3200 employees tops and an industry worth more than $2 BILLION. Compare that to, say, Ford or GM or any other manufacturing business. Similar for the NBA, Major League Baseball, NHL whatever. And they are often run by idiots–that certainly describes the NCAA leadership. Amazing.
LikeLike
This is a great point.
LikeLike
That sure is a lot of money for an organization that doesn’t actually, you know, do anything. How do I get in on that gravy train?
LikeLike
Be their endowment fund advisor.
LikeLike
Sue ’em. Or be their lawyer. Or be the lawyer that sues ’em.
LikeLike
hEY NOW. Lawyers have to eat, too. 🙂
LikeLike