http://espn.go.com/college-sports/recruiting/football/story/_/id/8041461/the-cost-recruiting Apparently Alabama gets a good return for its nearly 1 miilion dollar budget. Tennessee doesn't.
What jumped out at me is how much the service academies spend on football recruiting. West Point spent more than OU the last two years. Most of the jocks they sign will not be able to get regular appointments, so they will put them into these tax payer funded academy prep schools and they transfer to the academies in a couple of years if they don't flunk out. In these times of sequestration talk, I find this unbelievable. Plus, we as tax payers should expect the finest candidates to get the precious slots to the elite service academies, not some athletes who got backdoored in to play foobow.
a cousin of my GF played FBall at AirForce...was recruited by other schools. HATED it, basically they say you have 8+ hours a day with school and then football. Loved the academy but not fball AND the academy.
I have the highest respect for the academies. They ask those kids to do amazing things - formation, military training, rigorous academics, often engineering, and required sports, whether varsity or other. I saw this documentary on West Point years ago and they require the kids to box because so many grew up straight laced and were not used to physical violence and contact. I just don't think we should be paying for the academies to be able to compete at Division IA football. Heck, they would be fighting it out to win national titles at a smaller school level. Carry on those football traditions, except at another division level.
"Soldiers First" is a great book about football players at West Point in 2011. In the book it even mentions utilizing the prep academy - specifically that it isn't used very often and the coach wants to change that.
I can only speak for the AFA, but the football players (or any athlete) must meet the same entrance requirements that the rest of the cadets meet. They still have to recruit kids to play there, but they aren't dumb jocks that happened to slip into the academy. Since there are no scholarship athletes, they don't have to worry about that aspect, but attracting smart kids, that can play football, has to be difficult.
Uh, the 2013 Army football roster suggests that either Army has changed its practices a lot in the past two years, or the USMA prep school was a bigger source of footballers than the coach admitted. http://www.goarmysports.com/sports/m-footbl/mtt/army-m-footbl-mtt.html When Jim Webb, a USNA grad, was a US Senator, he held hearings on the misuse of taxpayers money for the prep schools acting mostly as backdoors for academies' football. I believe he pointed out that the majority of the USNA roster came from the USNA prep school. The criticism has been aimed mostly at West Point and Annapolis, not the Air Force Academy.
Yeah, the AFA is kind of removed from that scene. I don't know if it's because of location, or branch specific, but the AFA seems to be more present in the high school recruiting scene.
These are just doctored numbers put together by each school. None of them are the real expenditures by each program.
