When the Front Porch Becomes the House

I have been thinking about a number I wish I had not seen. According to recent reporting, Xavier has confirmed that its men’s basketball roster compensation for the coming season will be a little over $14 million. Not the cost of the basketball program. Not the cost of the coach, the assistants, the travel, the facilities, the recruiting operation, or whatever else it takes to run a high-major college basketball team. Just the roster.

I work at Xavier, which makes this a little awkward to write about. So let me say the obvious things first. I am not speaking for the university. I am not pretending to know everything that went into the decision. I am also not making the old argument that college athletes should be unpaid. I never found that argument very convincing. Universities built an entire moral language around amateurism while everyone around the athletes made money. I always found that moral language hard to take seriously. My discomfort is not with the idea that players should be paid. It is with what the number seems to reveal about what Xavier is becoming, or maybe what Xavier thinks it has to remain.

Basketball has been good to Xavier. I know this partly because I am from Massachusetts. Before I had any reason to think about Xavier as a place to work, basketball was probably the only reason I had heard of it. I still see versions of that in students who come here from well outside Xavier’s usual regional orbit. Basketball gives Xavier a name that is more widely recognized than a school of its size would otherwise likely have. That matters, and it would be dishonest to write this as if the basketball program were some vanity project bolted onto the side of the university. It is more than that. It gives alumni something to care about together. It gives students a shared ritual. It gives Xavier a national presence that most academic programs, however good, are unlikely to produce on their own.

There is some evidence for this idea. Devin and Jaren Pope found that success in football and basketball can increase applications, especially at private schools. Michael Anderson found effects on applications, donations, academic reputation, and student quality. So I am not trying to argue that basketball has done nothing for Xavier. The more difficult question is whether the old argument still works under the new price.

Xavier’s own fundraising language describes athletics as the university’s “front porch.” The phrase makes sense. A front porch is where people first encounter the house. It gives the place a public face. It is not the whole thing, but it helps people notice that the whole thing is there. Xavier says Big East athletics gives the university a national stage, builds pride, and elevates Xavier’s name. The athletic director is quoted saying that basketball enhances Xavier’s brand and identity and helps recruit students nationally. Again, I think much of that is true. But a front porch is still supposed to be attached to a house. It is not supposed to become the house.

That is the worry. Not that basketball has no value. Not that athletics cannot serve a university’s mission in any meaningful way. Not that athletes should be expected to generate value for everyone else while being told that compensation would corrupt the whole enterprise. The worry is that the cost of keeping the porch impressive is starting to shape what the institution can imagine for the house itself.

College sports have changed quickly. In 2025, a federal judge approved the House v. NCAA settlement, which resolved major antitrust claims against the NCAA and opened the door for Division I schools to pay athletes directly. The new system allows schools to share revenue with athletes, with the annual cap beginning around $20.5 million per school in 2025–26 and rising over time. For Xavier, this creates an odd situation. The university does not have a major football program, so men’s basketball carries much of the weight that football carries at many other schools. That has been part of Xavier’s strength. The school could concentrate attention and resources in a way that many universities could not. It could be small enough to feel intimate and large enough to appear on national television. But the same arrangement can become a dependency.

Once basketball becomes the main public symbol of the university, stepping back feels like losing ground. The spending does not have to be justified only by a clean return on investment. It can be justified by the fear of what happens if Xavier no longer keeps up. That is how escalation becomes normal. What begins as a choice starts to feel like rent.

Xavier is the case I know best, and it is the one that feels most personal to me. But the pattern is not only Xavier’s. Across higher education, athletics keeps being asked to solve problems that are not really athletic problems. Small private colleges add sports to attract students and fill residence halls. Larger programs spend more to remain visible in a crowded entertainment market. The scale differs, but the logic is related. When visibility, revenue, or enrollment becomes the problem, athletics starts to look like the answer.

At some point, this stops being only a sports question. Richard Rumelt argues that good strategy begins with diagnosis. An organization has to understand the actual challenge in front of it. Then it has to make real choices. That sounds obvious, but universities often struggle with it. They have too many audiences and too many inherited commitments. They add things more easily than they stop doing things. They produce plans, themes, committees, working groups, projects, initiatives, and language that can make almost everything sound strategic.

Basketball is different because it makes the problem feel unusually concrete. You can see the competitors. You can point to the roster. You can name the amount of money needed to keep up. That clarity is attractive, especially in a university where so much of the work is slower and harder to measure. Teaching, advising, and student development matter deeply, but they do not produce the same kind of immediate evidence. They are harder to sell to donors and harder to rally around in public. Over time, the visible work can become easier to fund than the quieter work, even when the quieter work is closer to the reason the university exists.

This is not a problem unique to Xavier. Organizations often become more alike while trying very hard to be successful. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell called this institutional isomorphism. Their point was not that leaders are foolish. It was that uncertainty makes imitation feel reasonable. When organizations are unsure what success requires, they look to other organizations that seem legitimate. They copy structures, language, metrics, and investments. Over time, everyone starts to resemble everyone else, even as each organization insists it is pursuing its own strategy.

For a long time, basketball helped make Xavier different. A mid-sized private Jesuit university could become nationally recognizable because it had an unusually strong basketball program. But in the new world, staying recognizable requires entering a more direct market for players. The spending is now more visible, more recurring, and likely to keep rising. At some point, what looked like differentiation can turn into conformity. Xavier may not be building a distinctive identity so much as paying the price of remaining in the category it has chosen.

Maybe that is still worth it. But if it is, the university should be able to say why in more than the usual language of pride, visibility, excellence, brand, and community. Those words are not false, exactly. They are just too easy. Every university with a serious athletic program can say some version of them. The harder question is whether basketball still gives Xavier an advantage that could not be built in some better and more durable way.

This is where opportunity cost matters. People sometimes push back on that argument because the money may be restricted. A donor who gives to basketball might not have given the same money to scholarships, faculty, advising, or academic programs. That is a fair point. Universities cannot simply move every gift wherever they want. But opportunity cost is not only about whether one dollar can be transferred from one account to another. It is also about what the university asks for, what it celebrates, and what it teaches donors to see as urgent.

Fundraising is not passive. Development officers do not simply wait for donors to arrive with fully formed preferences. Universities cultivate interests. They frame needs. They tell stories about what matters. They invite donors to imagine the future of the institution in some ways rather than others. If the most emotionally compelling invitation is to help basketball keep up, then keeping up becomes one of the clearest ways to be loyal to Xavier. That does not make donors bad. It means the institution has taught people what counts as ambition.

So the question is not simply whether $14 million could be moved from one account to another. The question is what Xavier is organizing itself and its supporters to imagine. What would the university try to become if the same urgency, creativity, and donor cultivation were aimed somewhere else?

I do not mean that as a rhetorical question with an easy answer. A university cannot become distinctive just by declaring a new priority. It would take focus, money, patience, and the willingness to disappoint people. It would probably be less fun. No one cuts down nets because first-year retention improved. No one fills a bar because a university built a more coherent undergraduate experience. But that is also the problem. The things that make a university matter are often not the things that make it famous.

This is why the organizational structure gives me pause too. At Xavier, the same person holds two important roles: Vice President for Institutional Strategy and Director of Athletics. I am not making a claim about anyone’s motives or about how every decision is made. The point is about design. Athletics gives the institution a clear and compelling way to talk about national relevance. When athletics and institutional strategy sit in the same role, the university should be especially attentive to whether athletics is being evaluated as one strategic option among others, or whether it has quietly become the default way the institution understands its future.

Organizations rarely drift because someone announces that the mission has changed. They drift through budgets, titles, habits, incentives, and assumptions. One part of the organization becomes so visible that other possibilities become harder to see. A costly commitment becomes familiar enough that questioning it starts to feel unrealistic. That may be what unsettles me most. The $14 million number is shocking, but what is more revealing is how quickly a number like that can be absorbed into the language of necessity.

It now seems normal for a university to ask donors to help fund a basketball roster, for a mid-sized private university to compete in an expensive national market for attention, and for all of this to be described as the price of keeping up. But maybe strategy begins by letting the familiar become strange again.

Why should a university’s national identity depend so heavily on an increasingly expensive market for basketball talent? Why should the cost of remaining visible keep rising without a deeper conversation about what the university is becoming? A mission-driven institution should at least be able to ask those questions before accepting the terms of this market as inevitable.

I do not think these questions have easy answers. There are real risks to stepping back. Xavier basketball is not a decorative extra. It is woven into alumni life, student experience, fundraising, local identity, and national recognition. Weakening the program could make the university feel smaller. It could alienate donors. It could reduce one of the few ways Xavier regularly appears on a national stage.

But there are risks to staying on the treadmill too. The cost of relevance may keep rising. The dependence may deepen. The university may become less willing to imagine other futures. Basketball may continue to produce visibility without producing the kind of distinctiveness Xavier needs most.

A front porch matters because it helps people see the house. For a long time, basketball has helped people see Xavier. Maybe it still does. But the house has to be worth entering. It has to have rooms people want to live in. It has to be built around something more durable than curb appeal. If maintaining the porch begins to determine what the house can become, then the university has a different problem. It is no longer asking how to be distinctive. It is asking how much it costs to keep being seen.