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By Christopher Witflee
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The signatures are on the papers and the lease for a new riverfront ball park is official, so the Reds will be here for the first third of the next century under very attractive terms. Sure, the bond between Cincinnati and the Reds seems eternal. But it's only renewed 30 years at a time.On a less glamorous front, an ad hoc faculty group at the University of Cincinnati has found that keeping a football team on campus isn't such a terrible idea. No doubt, the university administration thinks a football team is as essential as an English department. There will be kickoffs for many Septembers to come in Clifton, long after there are geology classes.
So the status quo survives on Cincinnati's athletic front, and the two oldest ongoing teams in town will live another day. And if neither of these developments succeeds breathless anticipation, it says something about the state of local spectator athletics that good news consists not in improvement but status quo. And the status quo isn't all that good.
UC's football team lost its first nine games in an 11-game season last fall. Who needs more of that? And yet, without it, UC loses a critical presence that keeps its name in the air and in view of alumni, the overwhelming majority of whom would otherwise forget about the place entirely.
A faculty group that suggested abolishing football last fall really couldn't have hoped to eliminate the team. It was trying to call attention to the diminishing status of academia at the university, which surely is a perversion. It is testament to the public's lack of concern with academia or football at the university that the story elicited barely a murmur.
Traditionally conceived, universities are supposed to extend the minds of young people, who graduate as humanized adults with the intellectual backbone to understand something of the world and improve their communities. College football, though wildly popular for nearly a century, served universities first by bringing luster to campus life.
But football provided the greater benefit of energizing the alumni, particularly stimulating those synaptic connections that move alumni to write checks for the general fund. It is commonplace in university fund raising that contributions rise and fall with the fortunes of football teams. That's why university administrators pressure coaches to win.
Yes, big-time spectator athletics at universities are, in some sense, a perversion against the traditional conception of the university, following a certain chain of motive. In broad outline, the chain goes something like this: Higher education is supposed to civilize people so they might ply their gifts toward prospering communities and lives well-lived. Taxpayers, through their state governments, fund public universities in order to make higher education widely available. It is an entirely legitimate public expenditure for the public benefit.
The beauty of UC football -- and even at 2-9, it's beautiful -- is that it isn't a cynical win-at-all-costs program. If Rick Minter finishes every season 5-6, he can be UC's head coach for life, if he wishes. UC alumni don't care if the football team wins, they don't care if it loses. They don't care, period.
That means the football experience belongs almost entirely to the team and the students. Inevitably, by the law of averages, the team will bring a bad apple to campus now and again, but Minter's ship is clean and untainted by pressure to win. Football at UC is what football should be everywhere -- a bonding and growing experience for young men coming of age, little contaminated by institutional avarice. UC's football program is full of unsung stories about kids bettering themselves through athletic competition. It truly is a thing of beauty.
If the Bearcats never compete for the national championship, that would be fine. But if they were to go away entirely, it would be a terrible loss.
An even more terrible loss, of course, would be the departure of the Reds, which would rob the city of its major league identity. Even in bad times, the Reds matter to more people in this town than any other institution.
Four years from now, the Reds will be in a new yard with hopes of doubling their revenues. About half of that $50 million annual gain comes from the deal itself, by which the Reds keep all luxury box, parking, concessions and stadium advertising money. The other half would come from price increases, along with the likelihood of increased attendance and consumption.
We might, indeed, witness an abrupt shift back to Cincinnati from Cleveland as the capital of Ohio baseball with the stadium opening. By 2003, Jacobs Field will be about 10 years old, and unless the Indians keep producing their own players they risk becoming a casualty of baseball economics. Meanwhile, the novelty draw will push middle-Ohio fans back to the riverfront, while some of the Reds' old constituency in the mid-Southeast is pulled back from Atlanta.
But none of this is of lasting benefit unless the Reds maintain a concerted effort to build a winning ball club, and that's going to take some risk. To their credit, they already are taking the risk and, if the fans haven't busted down the doors to Cinergy Field, the club has nudged into wild-card contention this soon into the season.
Though the importance of a new stadium for the Reds can't be overstated, the new revenue streams won't be nearly enough to ensure that the team will be profitable and competitive. These new revenue streams directly written into the deal are said by the Reds to be worth $24 million annually.
Consider that the Reds turned a pocket-change profit last year on a player payroll of $22 million. This year, without any guaranteed additional revenue, they will sink about $33 million into player salaries. Given an extra $24 million in stadium revenues, they break even with a player payroll of $46 million.
Not only would that still keep the Reds out of the neighborhood of the New York Yankees, they wouldn't even be in the neighborhood of the Toronto Blue Jays. In 1999 dollars, in fact, the Reds still would be in the lower half of all major-league payrolls. And, between now and next spring, new stadiums also are scheduled to open in Seattle, Detroit, Milwaukee, Houston and San Francisco. The Reds will be treading water in relation to those clubs, which means even new stadium revenue streams could leave them around 20th out of 30 clubs in player payroll.
So even with the new park, the Reds don't stand a chance of being profitable and competitive unless they beef up their farm system, make smart player expenditures, raise prices and increase attendance by about 50 percent. But the stadium gives them a fighting chance. Without it, they would have no chance.
On, then, to the future: football at Nippert Stadium and baseball on the riverfront. It looks an awful lot like today. It could have been a lot worse.
