SB Nation surveyed schools about how much they pay for outside police security and discovered that Alabama doesn’t pay one red cent. No doubt Greg McGarity is jealous. But, pity the poor schools, man:
“[Alabama’s athletic department] is in the event management business,” athletic director Bill Battle said Wednesday at the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in New York City. “We participate in about 400 events a year. We host about 200. Sometimes we have 150,000 people come to Tuscaloosa for a football game to sit in 101,000 seats. That’s a challenge in a lot of different ways, but that’s a great thing.
“But even when you have a successful football program, our [football] business generates about 80 percent of what our mission is,” with that mission defined as being “to develop and graduate student-athletes into good people.”
“If we want to truly accomplish our mission for all 500 of our student-athletes, it takes a lot of money to do that,” Battle said. “Nobody is pocketing a lot of money. Not many [schools] are making ends meet.”
The ones that do are doing so with a vengeance, though.
