There’s a reason ESPN broadcasts football games and not freshman juries.
For more than a century, colleges and universities in the United States have fought an ongoing cultural tug-of-war between athletics and the arts. Faculty meetings, budget committees, alumni boards, and state legislatures have all asked the same question in different forms: what deserves institutional investment? The arts departments point to cultural enrichment, intellectual development, creativity, and the preservation of human expression. Athletic departments point to enrollment, visibility, alumni engagement, television contracts, ticket sales, and money. Mountains of money.
As someone who makes a living in music, I’ll offer a hot take that many of my colleagues in the arts world probably won’t appreciate: when you can fill a 50,000-seat arena for a choral concert, then we can talk.
That statement sounds harsh at first, especially coming from a musician. But it reflects a reality that colleges and universities have understood for decades. Athletics, particularly football and basketball, function as revenue engines in American higher education in a way that most arts programs simply do not. Major athletic programs bring in television deals worth millions, attract donors, sell merchandise, drive alumni engagement, and create a public identity for institutions that would otherwise remain regionally unknown.
A winning football program can increase applications to a university almost overnight. A deep run in the NCAA basketball tournament can generate national exposure equivalent to millions of dollars in advertising. Stadiums seat tens of thousands of people because demand exists for tens of thousands of people to attend. The emotional connection Americans have with collegiate athletics is tribal, generational, and deeply woven into regional identity. In many parts of the country, the university football team is the closest thing the community has to a professional franchise.
Music programs operate in a completely different ecosystem.
Even the most elite collegiate music schools rarely draw audiences remotely comparable to athletic events. A university orchestra might perform brilliantly to an audience of 400 people. A choir might spend months preparing a masterwork only to sing for a half-filled concert hall. Faculty and students often look at the sprawling football facilities across campus and wonder why their practice rooms still contain broken pianos and chairs from the Reagan administration.
Their frustration is understandable.
But arts advocates sometimes make the mistake of pretending the comparison is economically equivalent. It isn’t. Football programs at major universities can bring in tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars annually. March Madness television revenue alone has become a financial juggernaut. Most collegiate arts programs, meanwhile, operate almost entirely as educational and cultural missions rather than revenue-producing enterprises.
That does not make them less important.
In fact, one of the great failures of modern American education is the tendency to measure everything by immediate profitability. Music education matters because human beings need beauty, expression, storytelling, collaboration, and emotional depth. A society that funds only what turns a profit eventually becomes spiritually hollow. Universities are not supposed to function exclusively as corporations. They are meant to cultivate human beings.
Music programs teach discipline every bit as rigorous as athletics. Musicians practice for thousands of hours in isolation. They learn collaboration, leadership, time management, listening skills, and emotional intelligence. Ensemble performance requires extraordinary teamwork. A choir functions with many of the same interpersonal dynamics as a sports team: accountability, preparation, sacrifice, and collective trust.
The difference is that society celebrates one kind of teamwork more visibly than the other.
Part of this discrepancy comes down to audience accessibility. Sports are immediate. You do not need formal training to understand whether a touchdown was exciting. Athletics create instant drama with clear winners and losers. The emotional payoff is obvious. Classical music, on the other hand, often requires cultural familiarity that many audiences simply do not possess. Someone attending a Mahler symphony for the first time may not have the contextual framework to appreciate it fully. Sports ask very little of audiences initially. Classical music often asks for patience, concentration, and education.
That gap matters.
In many ways, arts organizations and university music departments have struggled for decades with accessibility and public engagement. While athletics aggressively market themselves as entertainment experiences, classical music institutions often market themselves with a tone of reverence that unintentionally alienates newcomers. Football games are loud, communal, emotional, and intentionally inclusive. Symphony concerts can sometimes feel formal, rigid, and intimidating to audiences unfamiliar with concert etiquette.
Meanwhile, athletic programs have mastered spectacle.
College football is not merely a sporting event. It is an all-day cultural ritual. Tailgates, fight songs, mascots, traditions, uniforms, lights, student sections, alumni gatherings, and marching bands all combine into something closer to theater than pure competition. Ironically, some of the most visible arts education in America happens directly inside athletic culture.
The marching band may be the single greatest example of athletics and arts coexisting successfully on a college campus.
Every Saturday in the fall, tens of thousands of people cheer for musicians. They may think they came for football, but halftime often becomes one of the most memorable parts of the experience. Marching bands provide pageantry, emotional identity, school tradition, and communal energy. Fight songs become sonic symbols of institutional pride. In many cases, the band is the heartbeat of the stadium.
And here’s the irony: athletic departments often provide arts programs with their largest audiences.
A university choir concert may attract 200 attendees. A marching band performs for 50,000. One ensemble is considered financially expendable while the other becomes institutionally indispensable because it contributes directly to the athletic product. The relationship between athletics and music is therefore not purely competitive. It is symbiotic.
The smartest universities understand this.
Rather than framing athletics and arts programs as enemies competing for scraps, successful institutions recognize that both contribute to campus identity in different ways. Athletics create visibility and revenue. Arts programs create culture and humanity. One brings people to campus. The other helps give the campus a soul.
The problem arises when one side begins dismissing the value of the other.
Arts faculty sometimes speak about athletics as though sports are intellectually beneath them. Athletic supporters sometimes dismiss the arts as financially useless luxuries. Both perspectives are shortsighted. A university without athletics may struggle for visibility, alumni engagement, and financial growth. A university without the arts becomes sterile, transactional, and emotionally empty.
Students deserve both.
A campus should have roaring stadiums and beautiful concert halls. It should produce quarterbacks and composers, conductors and point guards, trumpet players and linebackers. Human civilization has always needed competition and creativity. Ancient societies held athletic contests and artistic festivals side by side because both fulfilled essential parts of communal life.
Still, economic realities cannot simply be ignored.
If a university president must decide between cutting a program that loses millions and protecting one that generates millions, the decision is often predictable. That does not necessarily mean the decision is morally correct, but it does mean it is institutionally rational. Universities today face immense financial pressures, declining enrollment in some regions, rising operational costs, and public scrutiny over tuition. In that environment, revenue-producing programs naturally receive protection.
This is where arts advocates must become more strategic.
Rather than pretending music programs can compete with athletics on pure revenue, arts departments should emphasize the broader value they provide: recruitment, retention, interdisciplinary education, community engagement, donor relations, public outreach, and institutional prestige. They should also rethink how performances are presented and marketed. Audiences crave connection and experience. The arts world sometimes forgets that excellence alone does not guarantee attendance.
The goal should not be to turn orchestras into football games.
The goal should be to remember that audiences are human beings looking for meaning, excitement, belonging, and emotional connection. Athletics succeed because they create communal experiences people want to share. The arts can do the same when they stop assuming audiences will automatically come simply because the performance is culturally important.
At their best, athletics and the arts actually pursue similar ideals. Both celebrate human potential. Both demand discipline. Both create identity and community. Both can inspire transcendence. A stadium roaring after a last-second touchdown and a concert hall sitting in stunned silence after a perfect cadence are not as different as they appear.
Both are moments where human beings gather to feel something larger than themselves.
So yes, my hot take still stands: when you can fill a 50,000-seat arena for a choral concert, then we can talk.
But maybe the deeper truth is this: universities need the people who fill the stadium, and they also need the people who write the fight song.