The University of Wisconsin has been teaching me important lessons for about 20 years now that I’ve graduated. Such as: Do n’t trust everything you read in press releases—including those from the University of Wisconsin.
There is also a more important lesson to be learned about how so-called immediate help organizations for public universities masquerade as people university foundations, booster clubs, and other similar entities.
My alma mater and I just had a legal dispute over the contract that governs the Badgers ‘ connection with Altius Sports Partners, a D-I sport department-specific consulting company. Our disagreement centered on whether or not the college had to give me these information legally.
The athletics department at UW announced on its site in September 2023 that it would hire an on-campus “NIL performer marketing manager” to expand its already established partnership with Altius. Especially, the statement stated:” University of Wisconsin Athletics, in partnership with Altius Sports Partners ( ASP), has expanded its commitment to providing NIL sources for its student- players”.
Thus, a few weeks later, I made a open records request for the amended agreement, as part of reporting on a tale about Altius’ on- school businesses. While other public universities turned over their agreements, mostly without redactions, Wisconsin denied my request, claiming that the Altius relationship was actually contracted through the University of Wisconsin Foundation, a separate 501 ( c ) ( 3 ). Given that no other Altius offer I’ve encountered was handled this way, it seemed strange why an athletic office consulting package would be handled through UW’s basis. ( A UW athletics spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. )
Sure enough, the school’s base, in turn, denied my demand, claiming that it was free from Wisconsin’s public records rules. ” UWF does not discuss its private firm knowledge”, the base told me in an email response. In February, I filed a lawsuit in Dane County ( Wisc. ) regardless of whether the school was officially required to obtain and provide a duplicate of the Altius contract, was challenged by the Circuit Court.
My initial request was revoked last month, and UW and the UW Foundation moved to ignore, contending that my description of a contract between the school and Altius, as opposed to the basis and Altius, was inaccurate. I had asked for the past, because until then, that was the only way in which UW had characterized the relationship. The basis is not mentioned at all in its public statements regarding the offer, even implicitly.
The UW Foundation requested a copy of the Altius agreement, which resembles the various Altius contracts I’ve seen in great detail. Given that UW is the primary beneficiary of Altius ‘ services, I ca n’t think of a compelling justification for why it was n’t a part of the deal.
This, of course, is almost the first instance of an athletic agency’s company being handled behind the mask of a college foundation or other kind of immediate- support organization. Increasingly, this is how the business of professional athletics is conducted, and as college sports enters the epoch of performer compensation—with a desire to raise and invest money in quick, fresh ways—it stands to reason that this pattern is going to maintain. As such, transparency will very often be sacrificed for the sake of expediency.
A plan to establish a new, school-run foundation that could be used to pay college athletes direct compensation was approved by the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees in March. The board of UT noted that the majority of its rivals in the Southeastern Conference already had a direct support organization ( DSO ) in place for each sport.
When Texas A&, M decided to buy out football coach Jimbo Fisher’s contract, at a record- setting price of$ 75 million, the school said it would be using some combination of athletic department funds and donor monies pooled through its DSO, the 12th Man Foundation. Public concern is raised by the kind of deals the university has made with donors to rescue them from this heavy albatross, but one that a purportedly independent and legally distinct booster group has obfuscated.
The 12th Man manages to give Texas A&M athletics tens of millions of dollars annually, but its annual tax return is largely the only source of information about its activities. However, it only provides a quarter of a billion dollars in net assets.
Georgia’s and Florida’s entire athletic departments live in the corporate bodies of separate nonprofit associations—as do those for Louisville, Florida State and Central Florida, along with the NCAA Division I military academies Army, Navy and Air Force.
Florida State, as Sportico previously reported, has been at the forefront of college sports ‘ search for private equity funding under the codename,” Project Osceola”. The goal of that effort, in my opinion, is to establish a new for-profit organization that would protect the athletic department’s commercial rights and allow for the taking of outside funding in ways that a public university might not be able to do, according to emails that my colleague Eben Novy- Williams eventually obtained from a public records request.
FSU turning over any records was not assured, given that Florida law exempts university DSO’s from the state’s sunshine statutes.
After I brought a consent decree last year demanding records from West Point and its athletics association regarding Black Knight-related records, the parties agreed to provide documents and respond to pending FOIA requests. Army tried to keep some details a secret, starting with changing the financial terms of contracts and employees.
The impulses against transparency are ever powerful, even when it’s counterproductive. University foundations have long been the focus of alleged scandals at UW-Oshkosh, College of DuPage, and University of New Mexico, which I filed for public records in 2017 ( and which I still fight over records ). Across the country, courts have increasingly—though, not uniformly—ruled that public universities should not be able to contract away their disclosure obligations by conducting business via fundraising alter egos, whose sole existence is to support those universities.
The right to public access is supported by a number of excellent public policy reasons, not the least of which is that the expectation of outside scrutiny aids in preventing malfeasance.
College sports ‘ history does not suggest that the sport has effective self-correction strategies. In fact, the seismic shift that is taking place is not due to the power structure, but rather to external forces that highlight the deceit and hypocrisy of the status quo. Any successful reform effort will require a educated public with an understanding of its bureaucracy in order to advance. The challenge is that direct support organizations ‘ increasing influence on the bureaucracy of college athletics has made it even more perplexing.
Imagine the lengths schools would go to keep the really interesting stuff hidden if it needed this kind of work to obtain a relatively prosaic NIL consultant contract.