Part 9- What's Happening on Campus: Win at All Costs: College Athletics and the Same Culture, With Even More Money on the Line
The Business Side First, Because the Numbers Explain the Behavior
Everything we just walked through in fraternities, protect the group, protect the institution, keep it internal, shows up again in college athletics, and honestly, it shows up with even more force, because the money involved isn't measured in alumni donations anymore, it's measured in billions.
According to a Wall Street Journal valuation study, the University of Texas football program alone is now valued at roughly 2.2 billion dollars, generating an estimated 298 million dollars in adjusted annual revenue. Texas A&M, Ohio State, LSU, and Michigan all sit above 1.4 billion dollars in program valuation. Fifteen separate college athletic programs are now valued above 1 billion dollars each, with the vast majority coming from the SEC and Big Ten conferences, and those top 20 programs saw their valuations jump 46 percent in a single year, driven by media rights deals now exceeding 4 billion dollars combined, along with the new reality of athletes being paid directly following the House v. NCAA settlement. This isn't a university club anymore. It's a genuine national media and entertainment business, operating on the same campuses where students live in dorms and attend 8 a.m. classes.
And that money shows up somewhere very specific: the coach's contract. It's been true for years, and it's still true today, that in a large number of states, the highest paid public employee, higher than any state senator, any agency director, sometimes higher than the governor, is a football or basketball coach at the state's flagship university. When that much institutional money and institutional identity rides on one person and one program's success, the incentive to protect that person, and to protect the program's reputation, becomes enormous. That's not a moral judgment on any individual coach. It's just what happens when an athletic department generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year: the program becomes something the institution needs to protect, sometimes ahead of the individual students inside it.
Same Pattern, Bigger Stage
We already covered two of the clearest examples of this pattern earlier in the series. Penn State's football program failed to act on warning signs about Jerry Sandusky for years, resulting in an 11-count Clery Act violation and a 2.4 million dollar federal fine. Michigan State's athletic department failed to stop Larry Nassar despite years of complaints, resulting in the largest Clery Act fine ever issued at the time, 4.5 million dollars, on top of a separate 500 million dollar settlement with his victims.
But those aren't isolated. Here are two more, both large enough and well-documented enough that there's no reasonable dispute about what happened.
The University of Michigan, Dr. Robert Anderson. For decades, a University of Michigan athletic doctor named Robert Anderson abused patients, many of them student athletes, during what were supposed to be routine physical exams. In January 2022, the University of Michigan agreed to pay 490 million dollars to more than 1,000 survivors, one of the largest sexual abuse settlements in the history of American higher education. The pattern here mirrors Michigan State and Penn State closely: complaints existed for years before real action was taken, and the athletic department's relationship with its own medical staff meant those complaints stayed internal far longer than they should have.
Ohio State University, Dr. Richard Strauss. This is maybe the starkest documented case of institutional knowledge outpacing institutional action. An independent investigation found that Dr. Richard Strauss, a team doctor, sexually abused at least 177 male student athletes over roughly 18 years, from 1979 to 1997. The investigation found that Ohio State personnel knew of complaints and concerns about Strauss as early as 1979, the very first year, but failed for years to investigate or take meaningful action. At least 50 athletic department staff members, including multiple coaches, corroborated what victims were saying, yet those allegations reportedly never left the athletic department or health center until 1996, nearly two decades later. Athletes reportedly had a nickname for him, and viewed his behavior as something close to an open secret inside the program. When he was finally investigated in 1996, Ohio State removed him as team doctor but allowed him to keep his tenured faculty position, and he continued practicing at an off-campus clinic afterward. Ohio State's own president later called it "a consistent institutional failure." In 2026, Ohio State reached a 100 million dollar settlement covering nearly 300 survivors, the largest such settlement Ohio State has ever paid, closing out a legal battle that ran for years after the truth finally came out.
Northwestern University football, 2023. This one isn't about a doctor, it's about the team itself, and it shows the exact same "protect the program" instinct playing out among players rather than staff. Multiple former players came forward alleging a hazing culture inside the football program that included forced nudity, coordinated physical restraint by upperclassmen wearing animal masks, referred to internally as the "Shrek Squad," and, according to one former player, having racial slurs shaved into his head. Longtime head coach Pat Fitzgerald was fired in July 2023 after the details became public, despite maintaining he had "no knowledge whatsoever of any form of hazing" inside a program he had led for close to two decades. Eight former players eventually filed lawsuits against the university.
Why This Keeps Happening, Structurally
None of these four cases are about one bad doctor or one hazing culture in isolation. They're about what happens when an institution's financial identity becomes wrapped up in a program's reputation. A billion-dollar athletic program, or even a modestly successful one by comparison, generates enormous pressure to protect its coaches, its medical staff, and its public image, because a scandal doesn't just hurt the people directly involved, it threatens donor relationships, television contracts, and recruiting, the entire financial engine we described at the start of this piece. That's the same incentive structure we described in fraternities and alumni giving, just with several more zeros attached, and a national television audience watching the version of the story the institution wants told.
What This Means for Your Family
I'm not telling you to keep your kid away from college athletics, whether they're playing or just cheering from the stands. What I am telling you is that when a program generates real money for a university, that program earns real institutional protection, and that protection has, in case after documented case, outlasted years of warning signs before the truth got out. If your student is involved in college athletics in any capacity, knowing that this pattern exists, and knowing where to go if something feels wrong that isn't the athletic department itself, is part of protecting them going in, not something to figure out only after something's already happened.
Sources
Former Ohio State team doctor abused at least 177 students, report says, PBS NewsHour
Ohio State reaches $100 million settlement with nearly 300 sex abuse survivors, CNN
New lawsuits allege devastating sexual hazing at Northwestern University, ABC News
Prepared, Not Paranoid. Protecting the Most Vulnerable Among Us.
