More on Tax Exemption...

We've been following the NCAA tax exemption situation for a while... to refresh your memory, check here:

Now they've done it
Tax Exemption, Part Deux
Quickly (see part on "Professionals, Part 2)
Someone Must Be Paying Attention
and, from Gladwell.com: Abolish the NCAA? and NCAA Redux

Today comes an article in the New York Times (!) that echoes these sentiments: Looks Like A Business; Should Be A Business. This article points to the Saban hire as being yet another piece of proof that the NCAA is not about academics, but about money (at least in the "major" sports).

Great quotes:

What kind of a skewed market makes these demands? First, the players are not allowed to be compensated. Instead, the coaches walk off with the value produced by the “student-athletes.”

Second, athletic departments have no shareholders who seek dividends or increases in stock value through higher reported profits. That is, these departments face no market pressure to turn a profit. Money finds a way to be spent in such a circumstance and costs bloat.

Third, athletic departments benefit from privileged tax treatment. Perhaps most notably, boosters can give money to the program and procure the privilege of buying some choice seats on the 50-yard line. Tax laws allow a booster to deduct 80 percent of such a donation, which in practice is little more than a personal seat license.

Fourth, it is in athletic directors’ self-interest to up the ante on coaches’ compensation. Their worth increases along with their coaches’ pay.

But the real point is that college athletics are not supposed to be run according to the rules of the marketplace. They are supposed to be run according to the norms of the university.

Athletic departments should not be able to have it both ways: either they are part of academia and are treated as nonprofit institutions, or they are professional enterprises, whose players are paid a salary and covered by workmen’s compensation, and they pay taxes like other business entities.