Unconquered

Report looks at FSU coaches’ expenses

If all you care about is the number of wins the football team gets each week, you won’t need to both­er reading the upcom­ing Sunday Exclusive. It is all about accountabil­ity within the Flor­ida State Universi­ty athletics program, without measuring wins and losses.

For months, our award­winning sports team has examined how FSU’s coaches spend public mon­ey while traveling on uni­versity business. We used public records requests and pored through mounds of documents to exam­ine the expenses coaches incur.

With a $2.4 million shortfall in the athlet­ic department budget for next year, forcing the uni­versity to make difficult decisions about dipping into reserves or cutting into programs, we think the reason our examina­tion is important is evident even to the most ardent sports fan.

We are cognizant that we are messing with the ultimate sacred cow in these parts; to the best of our knowledge, no newspa­per or member of the pub­lic has looked at athletic coaches’ expenses in this level of detail. Quite frank­ly, that’s because no one much cared how coaches spent money, as long as the stands were full, the mon­ey flowed in and the teams’ records were good.

Most of our focus in following the money, of course, has had to be on football. It is the golden goose, or at least it was until recently. Things have changed: The stands are not nearly as full, there is a new regime and way of doing business, and it has been a long time since FSU has fielded a cham­pionship team. In fact, almost everything is dif­ferent.

In truth, the athletic department and football programs that existed dur­ing the heyday of the Bob­by Bowden era were noth­ing like the programs of today.

The reality is all of col­lege football has changed and become all about the money. We are seeing that play out as FSU maneu­vers for the best possible deal for a conference, with no one seeming to talk about or care what’s in the best interest of the fan, the average Booster or a typi­cal mom and dad trying to take their kids to see a game. How could they, with so many zeros follow­ing the dollar signs?

Still, there will be those who won’t care what our report says ? seeing what­ever reporting we do only as an intrusion on fantasy­land. The team is looking good and, coupled with an especially weak sched­ule, seems ready to take its place again among the nation’s elite.

That is why we are pub­lishing our stories now, well before the football season begins, even as spring sports began to wind down. With so many millions of public money in play, we think it is essen­tial that someone be a watchdog on how that mon­ey is spent and that the people entrusted with that money be held account­able for how they use it.

Still, once the games start, the focus should be on the players and their accom­plishments.

We asked ourselves if FSU coaches were behav­ing differently from coaches at competing pro­grams.

We know that some will bring that point up.

But then we were remind­ed of that favored saying of mothers everywhere ? that if everyone else is jumping off the bridge, should we, too?

And ? though it is yet to translate into a foot­ball championship ? we acknowledge that FSU has had success in the recruiting wars, at least according to annual rank­ings by sports writers and other so-called experts.

And acquiring the best recruits is one of the rea­sons coaches travel. Even so, we believe our report is both fair and accurate, and raises important ques­t ions.

In the end we decided that the public has a right to know how its money is being spent.

We leave it to read­ers to decide what they think about our reporting and whether the time has come, given the economics of the current era not just in athletics but also in all of higher education, when we can’t continue to afford to not pay attention to how they spend the public’s mo ney.

? Bob Gabordi is execu­tive editor of the Tallahas­see Democrat and Tallahas­see. com. You can send your comments by emailing him at bgabordi@tallahassee.com, sending a private message on Tallahassee.com and Twitter @bgabordi or calling him at (850) 599-2177. You also can find links to his blogs on Face­book. By mail, our address is P.O. Box 990, Tallahassee, FL 32302.

Still, there will be those who won’t care what our report says ? seeing whatever reporting we do only as an intrusion on fantasyland.