THE FLUTIE FACTOR
F
rom the mid-1980s on, many admissions officers have prayed for the “Flutie Factor” to hit their schools, and many university administrators have invoked it to justify their excessive spending on college sports. The phenomenon has become so central to the link between intercollegiate athletics and student life, and created so much mythology, that it merits full examination.
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Suddenly, with television's saturation coverage of collegiate sports, small schools could gain national reputations ⦠. The applications for admission to Boston College rose 25 percent in the year following Doug Flutie's exploits as quarterback. Athletics success on the small screen would mean increased enrollments.
âMary Burgan, executive secretary of the American
Association of University Professors (AAUP)
For college sports fans, particularly the new ESPN generation, Doug Flutie's last-second “Hail Mary” pass in a nationally televised Thanksgiving weekend game, enabling Boston College to beat heavily favored Miami, was one of the most memorable moments of sports theater during the 1980s. Flutie also won the Heisman Trophy that year (1984) and, according to media commentators, put his school “on the map,” especially for younger sports fans. A surprising result of Flutie's triumph, never previously seen in American higher education, was that applications for admission to BC spurted upward during 1985-86; hence the term “Flutie Factor”
for application jumps sparked by nationally televised college sports victories. (Subsequently, when BC's football fortunes declined, so did applications, yet they remained higher than before the “Hail Mary” touchdown.)
Nevertheless, in all of the commentary on the Flutie Factor, writers have overlooked a concurrent factor at Boston College and most other schools experiencing the Flutie phenomenonâan increase in the party atmosphere at the school. BC, historically a quiet Jesuit institution in suburban Boston enrolling many local students, became a “hot school” in the mid-1980s for numerous high school seniors throughout New England and beyondâpartly because of its new college sports fame, but also because of its expanding party scene. And a key element in BC's beer-and-circus appeal was geographic location: in the 1980s, Boston became a “hot college town,” popular for its many bars, including the prototype of the Cheers pub in the hit TV series, and a magnet for huge numbers of college students as well as a site of on-going revelry, escalating on the weekends.
In the wake of the Flutie years at BC, Lisa Birnbach reported that some students there “unhesitatingly call BC a âparty' school, and say that, in fact, the worst thing about the place is that âschool is almost second to drinking, etc.' ⦠[In addition, students] make full use of the Boston nightlife.” Other publications offered somewhat similar portraits of BC, also emphasizing the Boston locale and the college sports connection; the
Insider's Guide to the Colleges
, compiled by
Yale [University] Daily News
staffers, began a mid-1990s description of the school with, “As the game-winning field-goal sailed through the uprights in Boston College's historic 1993 upset of top-ranked Notre Dame, BC was instantly vaulted into the national spotlight.” Again, a sports triumph on national TV caused another surge of applications; but, a few years later, when BC football players were involved in an ugly gambling scandal, the media attention damaged the school's reputation, also earning it the ESPN nickname, “Notre Dame's Evil Twin.” Applications to Boston College dipped and then, for the next few years, remained on a plateau, matching the football team's ordinary record.
However, for doublethink fans, notably the college applicants among them, winning and media attention seem to transcend all else, including scandals. As a result, schools like Boston College continue to pursue victory in college sports, pumping millions of dollars into their intercollegiate athletics programs; in addition, like BC, they willingly cover large athletic department deficits, all in the hopes of having a future Flutie moment.
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In the 1990s, university administrators began to discard the term “Flutie Factor” in favor of “mission-driven athletics”; in other words, no matter how much money the athletic department loses, no matter how much bad publicity the coaches and jocks generate with misconduct and scandals, a school should promote its big-time college sports program as an essential element of its “mission.” Of course, this “mission” has little to do with education and everything to do with keeping enrollment high and tuition dollars flowing. The saddest part of this formulation is that its premiseâmany applicants seek schools with high-profile college sports programs and flourishing party scenesâseems correct. And the most amazing part of the situationâa triumph of media images over reasonâis that many high school seniors confuse winning in sports with academic quality.
In the late 1980s, Carnegie Foundation investigators discovered through extensive polling that large numbers of high school students, “apparently impressed by âThe [College] Game of the Week'” and other televised college sports events, “say that an outstanding athletic team means that a college will have an âabove average' academic program.” This explains one element of the Flutie Factorâsometimes high school seniors with SAT/ACT scores above a school's regular applicant average are in the Flutie cohortâand it also prompts Admissions Offices to fill their literature with images of college sports events and of happy students cheering for their teams, and to hope that their teams win.
Subsequent polling of enrolled students at Division I schools revealed that to the questionâ“When applying to colleges for admission, how well informed were you about the intercollegiate football and/or men's basketball teams of the schools to which you applied?”â88 percent of males and 51 percent of females answered positively (“very well informed” or “moderately well informed”). However, to the questionâ“When applying to colleges for admission, how well informed were you about the undergraduate education programs of the schools to which you applied?”âamong Division I respondents, only 39 percent of males and 42 percent of females answered affirmatively.
Predictably, the responses from students at Division III institutions were very different: they showed much less prior knowledge of their schools' sports teams and much more of undergraduate education programs.
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Because common sense, as well as consumer awareness, dictates that applicants to colleges and universities should inform themselves fully about undergraduate education, the responses to the question on this topic from Division I students, and particularly the cohort at Big-time U's (Division I-A
universities) are distressingâbut not surprising. How could these applicants find out about the quality of education at these institutions? Invariably, Admissions Offices gloss over general undergraduate education in their literature, instead supplying endless photos of small groups of students sitting in seminar rooms or on grassy lawns with a professor (lawns, because of the high ambient noise level and distractions from passersby, are rarely conducive to teaching or learning).
The responses to the question about knowledge of football and men's basketball squads are also predictable. Not only do Admissions Offices feature these teams in their material, but, more important, the media pours out constant information about them, the volume increasing enormously as ESPN and other all-sports outlets expand. In addition, the media often focuses on the party elements surrounding college sports events, including TV shots of drunken students with painted bodies, holding up their index fingers to signify, “We're Number One!”
Admissions Offices are more subtle about beer-and-circus, using photos of the festivities surrounding college sports events but, in deference to M.A.D.D. and for fear of scaring parents, never showing alcohol being consumed. However, high school seniors know how to interpret the pictures of parking lots full of tailgaters and pre- and postgame student gatherings, particularly after hearing about the campus beer-and-circus scene from friends attending the school and after making on-campus visits. Therefore, the results to the survey question on the importance of the fame-of-team-and-party-scene in college selection were predictable.
Beyond the quantative results of the poll, individual responses to the P.S. requestâ“If you wish to comment further on any aspect of intercollegiate athletics and student life prompted by this questionnaire, please place your comments below”âwere revealing. A typical comment came from a sophomore at Syracuse:
In high school, I found myself applying to colleges based on how their sports teams performed. Among my choices were Syracuse, Arizona, Seton Hall, and Indiana. These were all schools with big-time basketball programs. I wanted to win a basketball national championship while in college and what better place to go than Syracuse, especially because I love to celebrate b-ball victories.
A striking element of this responseâand found in quite a number of othersâwas the student's identification with the team, “
I
wanted to win” a title. Syracuse never won an NCAA men's basketball championship during
this student's undergraduate years, but, if it had, only coach Jim Boeheim, his assistants, and the players could use the first-person pronoun to describe their goal and victory.
In earlier periods, and to some extent in the present era, many college applicants chose schools mainly for geographic reasonsâthey wanted to remain near their homes, or they sought a warm climate, et cetera. But in an age of national TV, increasing numbers of high school seniors, particularly those seeking to participate in a collegiate subculture, apply to schools with winning sports programs.
An admissions official at a university that experienced the Flutie Factor after appearing in a Rose Bowl game commented, “It seems funny to say that sports validates an institution for a student [who is applying to college] ⦠but students want to go to a school that people are talking about. It may be subliminal but it is real.” Subliminal for some applicants, but clear and articulated by many others.
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Nonetheless, what occurs in the Admissions Offices of schools pursuing college sports victory and fame but falling far short? In the final decades of the twentieth century, the two-edged sword of sports media attention not only swings back at universities with athletic department scandals, but also at those with teams that lose too much. Because sports fans, particularly college-age ones, are increasingly obsessed with winning and attaching themselves to winning teams, their contempt for losers also grows. In a cynical age, doublethink fans shrug off scandals involving their favorite teams far more quickly than they do defeatsâfor these partisans, cheating is not the worst thing, losing is. Therefore, when the media labels the teams of certain schools as “losers,” an antiâFlutie Factor probably occurs, with applications dropping below their regular average (no Admissions Office would respond to questions on this formulation, but common sense suggests the drop). In this case, “mission-driven athletics” could drive a university into an unforeseen cul-de-sac.
The media is central to the antiâFlutie Factor, but it never examines it. However, a detailed study of a university currently experiencing this phenomenon reveals important and relevant information, particularly useful to schools contemplating a move into big-time college sports.
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Bests and Worsts [in College Football]
Worst team: [University of] Buffalo in its first major college season.
âSteve Weiberg and Jack Carey,
USA Today
reporters
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The University of Buffalo got blown out Saturday. Again. And after a demoralizing 41â20 loss to Mid-American sad-sack Kent [State University, longtime owner of the worst losing streak in big-time college football]. It's a good bet UB will have to wait until the 21st century before getting the first win of its new Division I-A era ⦠.
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“I can't change the perception [of us as losers], I can't change how people react,” said Bulls coach Craig Cirbius.
âMike Harrington,
Buffalo News
reporter
Of course, this coach and the university officials above him at Buffalo could have changed “the way people react” and the loser tag; instead of moving the school into NCAA Division I-A big-time college sports in the 1990s, they could have remained in a lower group or, even more appropriately, returned to nonathletic scholarship Division III where Buffalo resided in the 1980s. UB administrators could have also improved and promoted the educational parts of their institution instead of spending a fortune on big-time intercollegiate athletics. According to one UB professor, these days [spring 2000], “faculty ask, why not take the dollars out of the football team and put them into the academic side?”
In the 1960s and 1970s, the State University of New York at Buffalo, emphasizing its graduate and research programs, attained membership in the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU). In college sports, Buffalo could have joined the low-key Division III University Athletic Conference, and played such academically important schools as nearby Rochester, Carnegie-Mellon, Case Western Reserve, and New York University. Instead, Buffalo administrators, and an eager athletic department, decided to take the school to the top college sports level, no matter what the financial cost or the appropriateness to the educational mission of the institution.