The places where the profitability of football is in question is basically everything lower than the 5 main conferences (Big 10, SEC, ACC, Big XII, and Pac 10), and especially the schools lower than that level which aren't reliable winners. (Think the San Jose State's of the world)
Clemson football generated 50 million dollars last year
It's profitable only because the players aren't paid. Only a small percentage of the players make it to the NFL. Many of the remainder suffer physical consequences for the rest of their lives. It's one of the most obscene exploitation schemes still remaining.
First, there are not many teams with over $50 million in profits, only the top 13 as of 2018. [0]
Second, you're assuming that even the top players would only make the minimum, which you have arbitrarily set at $200k, assuming that they would be paid less than the minimum NFL salary. The more accurate measure would be to pay them some percentage of the average NFL salary, which was $1.9 million in 2018. [1] So assuming the average college player salary would be 40% (to use your arbitrary number), that would be just under $800k per player. Even with a 53-player roster, that puts player salaries at over $40 million annually, which wipes out profits for all but the top 15 or 20 teams.
Third, I didn't say these players "aren't that good." The fact that only 2% of them make it to the NFL doesn't mean the other 98% aren't that good, it just means that the market won't bear paying for more players when they're fairly compensated.
The average college football player, with their 2% chance of making it to the NFL, is worth the median NFL salary of roughly $800k? This has gone a little too far off track for me.
The core issue here is claiming that profits are derived from not paying players. There are plenty of teams not paying players and losing money. The top teams could pay players well and still make profit. There's a small Goldilocks zone where what players should be paid lines up with the team's level of profit. The old "profits come from not paying workers" canard is a story with little to no explanatory power here.
that's nothing against the european hooligan scene, who meet to literally bash each other's heads in, in the extreme cases. While the societal affiliations hardly compare, the disparity is the same.
If you lose, it's your fault, but if you win, then we win. It's symptomatic, whether with burned out programmers, upto and over 50% of university drop-outs (in certain programs like maths or physics at least), blue collar workers who break their backs, etc. etc.
University athletic departments have to compete with NFL salaries in much the same way that university CS departments have to compete with FAANG salaries.
Clemson's football program has been exceptional under Dabo. I can see how his 10-year contract is justified.
The top college football programs pull in over a hundred million in revenue each year. Clemson is on it's way there. And that's only in media, ticket sales and such. I'm sure schools with excellent football programs are more likely to attract students and alumni donations.
EDIT: Thinking more about it—there are secondary effects as well. If a team does well, it attracts fans from out of town. Those fans will spend money on food, drinks, entertainment and hotels. That provides local businesses money and the city tax revenues.
Athletic departments don't necessarily have a need to be profitable, and most are not. Clemson averages ~$77 million in revenue over the last few years, mostly from valuable TV rights and ticket sales.
the harder it is to find flaws in the Standard Model, the harder it would be to use such new physics in engineering.
Basically I'm curious whether continuing failures to find new physics can be taken as evidence that, if and when we find the new physics, it will be very difficult to apply.
I'm not against science for its own sake, however. Just more of an engineer than a scientist, myself.
Don't forget that our engineering ability grows as well. I guess that when Einstein proposed his relativity theories, it seemed totally inapplicable. But fast forward a few decades, and we got GPS which wouldn't work without them.
Depends on the kind of difficulty. If it's quantitative, as in requiring orders of magnitude more energy, mass or time, then yes.
But it might be just more difficult qualitatively, like some different and non-intuitive way of interpreting everything, which might only require switching a few equations and changing some procedures.
If the effects require an accelerator the size of a small country to show up, then it's unlikely they'll be useful in anything small.
I think people have been misled by science fiction. Stories posit all sorts of interesting and exciting physics not because that's plausible, but because it makes interesting stories.
The nice thing about precision nuclear physics is that often lower energies are enough -- most accelerators actually have too much energy to measure the proton radius for example. And energy recovering linacs for these energies can be build quite small. Think Basketball court.
"the harder it is to find flaws in the Standard Model, the harder it would be to use such new physics in engineering."
I think that is very likely, but not necessarily guaranteed. I use similar logic with regard to FTL and time travel; if physics has not quite entirely ruled it out, the window is getting smaller and smaller, and is already to the point it's entirely plausible that even if it's theoretically possible there may be no conceivable engineering path to get to it, even for a hypothetical civilization that can fling black holes around.
However, we can't entirely rule out the possibility that some new physics will come along that will reveal how to easily "flip" matter into anti-matter (there seems to be no fundamental reason why this is impossible, it's just... too hard to be useful), or enable the creation of some state of matter or energy that may be exceedingly unlikely to be created naturally [1], but once created could be leveraged into something useful, or other such things. Stabilized muon fusion [2]? Relatively & QM fusion will certainly reveal something new about gravity; it can't be entirely ruled out that it will in some way be useful to engineering. (Although in this particular case, remember we can eliminate not just the "scientific" theories, but also observe engineers have yet to blunder into anything that seems to indicate any manipulation of gravity in any sensible way. Every real-world device ever built is also a test that shows that particular device must not be doing large-scale gravity manipulation.) Will quantum computers reveal some limit of reality's ability to calculate, and will that limit somehow itself turn out to be useful? Maybe.
Still, I tend to think that as much fun as flights of fancy about time travel, FTL, or bizarre alien tech can be, that the most likely hypothesis by far is that we are indeed very unlikely to discover anything in particle physics anymore that will be of any engineering value.
But I wouldn't counsel disappointment. There's still a lot of room at the bottom. We're not going to run out of technology in our lifetimes. If particle physics bores you, check out what's going on in materials science. They're making qubits sing and dance on command. It may still not build UFOs, but they're doing weird stuff in there.
