A Little Misunderstanding of a Common Term
The Cincinnati Enquirer had an interesting report on Thursday regarding Xavier. According to the story, Rivals.com called to let them know that they chose senior guard Drew Lavender as its “Mid-Major Player of the Week”. Whereas most are happy to see their student-athletes recognized for their efforts, Xavier athletic director Mike Bobinski apparently didn’t like it.
“It’s such an easy thing to do to put labels on people,” Bobinski said to the paper. “But you do an injustice when you don’t know or tell the whole story by lumping people into broad major or mid-major categories.”
Later in the story, Bobinski further took issue with the label of “mid-major”. The paper said the school considers the term derogatory. To make a long story short, Bobinski is another who doesn’t understand the label. His comments to the paper illustrate someone who thinks the term refers to how good the team is, when that’s simply not true.
Yes, Xavier has been a highly successful program. You can put it up against the likes of many from the Big East and even Big Ten, for a geographic similarity, and it will compare quite favorably. The Musketeers are in the midst of a terrific season right now, get great crowds at the Cintas Center and have an excellent coach leading the program. No one denies that.
And yes, the Atlantic 10 is having quite a season. It’s looking more like the Atlantic 10 of the mid-90s, when Temple and UMass led the way and it was right there with the Big Six conferences, than the A-10 of the past few years, where the Missouri Valley had basically reached the status the Atlantic 10 had about 10 years ago.
But all that success doesn’t change the fact that according to the Office of Postsecondary Education, Xavier’s athletic budget is about $11 million, which puts it in the bottom half of Division I when it comes to athletic budgets. They rank 184th, with schools like Elon and Big West members Sacramento State and Cal Poly just ahead of them. Their budget ranks in the bottom half of the Atlantic 10 as well.
Xavier made $7 million with its athletic operations last year, which is one more feather in their cap – they’re not only successful on the playing field, but they make money, too. They deserve a lot of credit for the way they operate, and if anything, this makes their story better. It’s another testament to the job the athletic department does, as they’re among those who do a lot more with less.
That brings us to the term “mid-major”. The term refers only to athletic department spending and has nothing to do with how good a team is at all. Wins and losses, championships and Sweet 16 appearances have nothing to do with it. Hence, for those who wonder when a team can “shed” the label – an oft-asked question by fans of successful mid-majors like Gonzaga, Butler, and Southern Illinois to name a few, there’s an easy answer: they can shed that label when that school’s athletic department budget takes a big leap. Gonzaga can make the Final Four every year, but as long as its athletic budget ranks 208th in Division I, they’re going to be a mid-major.
This isn’t to say that athletic departments should recklessly spend money just so they can not be considered a mid-major. No one should do that. But the reality of the term “mid-major” is what it is, and Xavier fits it quite well. Gonzaga head coach Mark Few’s dislike of the term is well-documented, but facts are facts when it comes to athletic spending.
In professional sports, teams are often described in a very similar way on the size of their market. The “big market” and “small market” designations can’t be changed by a team’s success or lack thereof. The only thing that will ever change them is more people flocking to the areas and the media market increasing in value. Even if the Minnesota Twins ran off ten World Series championships in a row, or decided to bloat their payroll the way the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox have done with theirs, Minnesota would still be a small market, unless its population exploded and the media coverage of the team changed drastically. They would simply be a great story of a team that does more with less.
The sports world is full of teams or departments that operate very successfully on small budgets, much like the business world as a whole. A school that achieves the success that a Gonzaga or Xavier has is a great story as a result, and describing those schools with an accurate term doesn’t change that. It doesn’t take away their success – indeed, it shines a light on it by noting that they’re doing all the winning they are with a much smaller budget than the majority of Division I schools. Certainly, calling a company one of the “best small companies” is hardly a derogatory description, and so, too would putting a school among the best mid-majors. I’m not sure any company that has been in a magazine’s listing of the “best small companies” has ever called up the magazine and said, “Please take us out of there, we think we’re better than a small company.”
Instead of trying to claim that his school is something it’s not – a school that spends an insane amount of money on athletics every year – Bobinski should be happy to tell the story of how his athletic department wins games and makes money. It’s a good story, and a far better one than turning down an award just because he doesn’t understand the term.
