Betsy Hoffman says a winning football team draws donations to the university. That's the conventional wisdom, and that's why she just glad-handed potential donors assembled for the Big Game.

Hoffman is president of the University of Colorado, whose Golden Buffaloes got tarnished in the New Year's Day Fiesta Bowl (final score: Oregon 38, Colorado 16). The Fiesta Bowl was played in Tempe, Ariz., so a gaggle of top university officials traveled on the university's dime to drum up a few more bucks. Or so they think.

In Arizona, Hoffman socialized with CU alumni, friends and fans. On Monday, she attended a $20-per-person breakfast, a lunch for 90 people and a cocktail party with 250 people.

Michael Byram, who runs the university's fund-raising arm, says donors are giving to athletics and academics alike. This year, he notes, CU professors won a Nobel Prize and a MacArthur fellowship. "The football team just epitomizes what a great year this has been. The university is on the edge of greatness."

It's remarkable that a Nobel Prize can take a university to the edge of greatness.

But here's an impolite question: If winning football teams really increase donations to the university, shouldn't CU be able to prove it?

It's abundantly clear that winning athletic teams generate more donations to athletics. Donations to CU athletics soared in the late 1980s and early'90s, during one of the football program's heydays. Gifts to academics did not rise accordingly.

Two years ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education compared the fund-raising success of Kansas State University and the University of Oklahoma, which had, during the previous decade, seen steadily improving and deteriorating football programs, respectively.

During the 1990s, donations to the KSU athletic department soared, and donations to academics also rose, but comparatively slowly. KSU's fund-raisers attributed the increase in donations to the university to improved fund-raising techniques, not to football.

Also during the'90s, the University of Oklahoma lost its standing as a football powerhouse. In the 10 seasons after 1989, Oklahoma lost 50 games, more than twice as many as were lost in the previous 10 seasons. Nonetheless, private donations hit all-time highs. "We couldn't say lack of success in winning football games has had an impact," said the University of Oklahoma's top fund-raiser.

A ground-breaking study published in 1984 by two Notre Dame professors tracked donations to 99 top universities over the course of the previous nine years. They found "no meaningful effect" of winning sports teams on academic donations.

Still, CU embraces the conventional wisdom. CU's president earns about $285,000 annually, but the head football coach's salary package is about $720,000 annually. Right now, the university is trying to raise nearly $300 million for the Boulder campus. Athletics will get $46.4 million of that, but the library will get only $11.5 million.

When the CU president says winning teams yield higher academic donations, the appropriate response is a simple, empirical request: Show me the money.

Reach Clint Talbott at (303) 473-1367 or talbottc@thedailycamera.com.

January 3, 2002

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