In theory - no. But the state has a $2B budget deficit. So if we want to get angry about how the state is spending money on anything? This is probably item number 2,474 on the list. Don't want to turn this into a cesspool discussion, but this is a ridiculous line of discussion.
Whether the football team is a top 10 team, the clownshow that is is today, FBS, FCS, D3, non-existent, or whatever - the only measurable financial impact to any individual citizen of CT is whether or not they decide to buy tickets and go to the game. And IF we were a top 10 team, everyone on this board would be ok if the subsidy was double.
Not caring about item number 2,474 on the list is how they get away with item number 2,473, and so on...
I'm not saying we should drop football. But the political climate in this country is rife with corruption, ignorance, and power imbalance. Taking your advice is the "what's one more beer?" approach to state spending, and while I'm hard pressed to disagree with you on a personal level, I think we'll have to acknowledge after a while that we're the ones reinforcing this cycle at every turn.
Connecticut is a state of about 3 and a half million people, so any state investment is going to yield minimal ripple effects. In theory, every person in the state could have paid $3 and the Kevin Ollie buyout would have been a non-issue. Instead, it could raise tuition costs considerably, pending the legal result.
And that's really where we're confronted with an ethical dilemma that's far less gripping than birth control or healthcare or police reform, but maybe in the long run as important. The people spending state money are predisposed to the particular thing they're spending on. That means the state is never going to get an accurate gauge of public sentiment on the investments that require its citizens to foot the largest part of the bill.
The fallacy that such a dissonance presents is fairly self-evident. People who are already in power keep their power by spending the money of people who don't know it's being spent.
This isn't new, of course, but it does speak to the diminishing returns of our democracy as it's stuffed further and further into the darkness by folks who lecture people on the value of voting but yet don't bother to live that way when they get the chance.
If we're going to OK another however many years of UConn football, which is almost guaranteed to operate at a loss, we should consider whether that makes us part of the problem or the solution.
As I've said before, it's not the most important issue, but it is the issue that calls on our expertise. We've seen what happens to that money. Other people haven't. I feel like we owe it to them to put the dog down if that's what it comes to. Otherwise, I don't know how we could expect anything different in return.
