re: Bill Snyder: Money-driven college football is "in a bad place"

quote:

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Dumb question -- is there something which prevents schools from dipping into the endowments to run athletics? I know they all say football and hoop fund all the sports, but every school has hundreds of millions, if not billions, in these endowments. I've always wondered what prevents them from throwing $20 million at Saban a year.

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As a practical matter, most endowments simply aren't big enough. The University of Alabama only has about a billion and that's for the whole system. The purpose of endowments is to (mostly) live off of the interest, not hit up the principal.

And probably a heavy bulk of any endowment is dedicated. Some dude that parlayed his engineering degree from Alabama into riches might give ten million but he wants it used to endow a chair and/or fund capital improvements in the engineering department so the school can't use it to help pay Saban even if they were inclined to do that.