Thirteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

In an era where public colleges and universities are competing for ever-dwindling funds from state governments that keep that budget line flat after years of decline, anything that schools can do to attract the positive attention of their state legislatures can been seen as a plus. Standard variables like state fiscal health and the partisan make up of the state government do predict the bulk of the spending on higher education, however there is reason to believe that other, more cultural variables may matter as well. In this paper we look closely at the U.S. state of Iowa and its budget and spending on higher education. American football is a popular sport in Iowa and teams from all three public universities in the state field teams that sometimes play very well, and, at other times, not so much. As the attention that these teams draw when it comes to their performance is widespread and culturally important in Iowa, we hypothesize that it may influence the amount of money state legislators allocate to those schools. In order to test our hypothesis we gathered budgetary data from the public records of the Iowa state government and win/loss information from the National Collegiate Athletics Association from 1987 to 2016 and performed a series of analyses. We found mixed support for our hypothesis, indicating that in some instances sports performance may impact funding. Our findings have particularly important implications for smaller state schools.