Is college sports irreparably broken?
Good question.
That was something Bobby Tudor addressed in a lagniappe part of his speech to the Alexandria Downtown Rotary Club last week. His main topic was energy, which is fitting since he is the founder and CEO of Houston’s Artemis Energy Partners, but offering his views on college sports was appropriate, given his history of involvement with sports.
Tudor was a star basketball player for both Pineville High School and Rice University, and he is the past chair of the Rice University Board of Trustees. He was a pure shooter on the basketball court, and last week he fired some shots at the financial insanity in college sports.
Tudor has the ear of some people in high places, such as Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who chairs the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which spearheaded major federal legislation to reform modern college athletics.
He said he told Cruz what he thought of the Protect College Sports Act, which passed with bipartisan support in the Senate in September, 77-22.
“I told Cruz I think it is kind of a finger in the dike,” said Tudor. The bill is supported by the NCAA, 32 major athletic conferences, more than 380 schools, professional leagues (NFL, NBA), the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and the Trump Administration. It is opposed by groups like the National College Players Association, the NAACP, and the AFL-CIO, who argue the bill favors institutions and the NCAA over athlete rights. The huge gains by Democrats in the midterm elections last week, however, might deal a blow to the bill, especially since it was supported by Trump.
One can look at our state’s flagship university, LSU, to get a sense of the huge scope of the out-of-control spending on athletics. LSU, which long had a self-sustaining athletic budget, expects to be hit with a $26 million deficit for the 2026-27 fiscal year, LSU President Wade Rousse told the Louisiana Board of Regents in September. According to a report from the Louisiana Illuminator, LSU spokesperson Meg Sunstrom shared that the department was $44 million in the hole last fiscal year, a number that went beyond what the initial projections for the 2025-26 year were when revenue sharing began in the fall of 2025.
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, as of an August audit, had the biggest athletics deficit among the 10 state colleges governed by the Board of Regents at nearly $13.3 million, according to Louisiana Voice, or about $17 million, according to other sources.
Wilbert Pryor, a board member suggested last month that ULL, Louisiana Tech, and the University of Louisiana at Monroe could downshift their football programs to help address multimillion-dollar athletic deficits, though he later described the comment as off-the-cuff.
Pryor suggested ULL, ULM, and Louisiana Tech move from the Football Bowl Subdivision to the Football Championship Subdivision, reclassifying the schools from the highest level of Division I to what was known for years as Division I-AA.
Tudor pointed to a traditional major sports program, UCLA, with a hemorrhaging athletics department. Since 2019, UCLA’s athletics program has a cumulative deficit exceeding $241 million, according to the Los Angeles Times, driven by rising travel costs and administrative payroll following its transition to the Big Ten, alongside dropping donations and ticket sales.
Since the advent of NIL revenue for college athletes, men’s football and basketball are essentially professional sports, except without rules regulating competition. The bidding wars began when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2021 (National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston) that NCAA rules aren’t protected from antitrust scrutiny.
NIL is “payroll , and it is crowd-sourced payroll,” said Tudor. Wealthy donors and fans can help independent businesses or booster-led “collectives” to pool money to sign athletes to endorsement, appearance or social media deals. These “collectives” can essentially provide player salaries. Depending on how the money is donated, it might be tax-deductible, which Tudor said is “nuts, nuts beyond nuts.”
The problem isn’t with the athletes, Tudor said, so much as it is with “university leaders who abdicated their responsibility. They could’ve said, ‘We’re not doing this.’ But, if they did, they’d probably lose their job. They faced three choices: ‘I resign,’ or “I put my stick in the ground and say we’re not doing this,’ or ‘I’ll go along.’”
Too many, he said, went along, and that’s why we’ve got a free-for-all that gives the heavy advantage to the four power conferences. Yet even those schools are spinning out of control with reckless spending.
“Imagine,” said Tudor, “somewhere out there is a linebackers coach who is making $700,000! He’s a LINEBACKERS coach, not a doctor!”
When and how will the financial insanity end?
“It’ll end when people have had enough,” said Tudor. “When (university) leaders say, ‘I’m out. We’re going to do something that coincides with our core values. If we keep going at this level, people are going to say, ‘We can’t do this.’ The state taxpayers don’t want to do it.
“And, by the way, he added, “there are plenty of good linebacker coaches who will do the job for $200,000.”
Contact Bob at sports@journalservicesllc.com