It’s a story worth shouting from the rooftops.
Now, can the University of Toledo get people to listen?
That was the question at the heart of a strategic planning retreat last week to map the future of UT athletics.
By some measures, the Rockets are wrapping up their greatest school year ever.
The football team won the Mid-American Conference championship and a bowl game for the first time in 21 years. Women’s basketball won the league and an NCAA tournament game for the first time in 31 years. Men’s basketball won its third straight conference title for the first time ... ever.
And that’s just the half of it. Three other Toledo programs won championships, too.
But for all the achievements, how much did they truly budge the national needle?
One industry leader provided an eye-opening perspective.
Kevin White — the just-retired former athletic director at Duke and Notre Dame and the keynote speaker for the UT retreat Monday — told a group of coaches, administrators, academics, and community stakeholders gathered at Savage Arena that the Rockets’ banner year was news to him.
“You’re having great success, and unless I got my nose on the internet, I wouldn’t have known all of that,” he said. “I just didn’t know. How come I didn’t know? Shame on me. But, quite frankly, shame on all of you. You need to become good storytellers.”
OK, then!
In any case, the gentle admonition got us thinking about the university’s broader fight to sell its story, and the role athletics can — and needs to — play in stemming and reversing its enrollment tailspin.
It’s no secret: Toledo is losing students at a rate that threatens its very existence.
The school still does a good job appealing to our market. Of the high school students in Lucas County who attended a public college after graduation last year, 41 percent of them went to UT. That’s an exceptional capture rate, and higher than, say, Ohio State’s in Franklin County (38 percent), Cincinnati’s in Hamilton County (38), and Cleveland State’s in Cuyahoga County (18).
The problem is when Toledo casts its net outside northwest Ohio. (Its market share is 2 percent in Cuyahoga County and only 1 percent in Franklin County.)
“That’s where we’re killed,” UT President Gregory Postel said.
All told, the university has become one of the more dire emblems of a nationwide enrollment decline. Its undergraduate and graduate headcount continued to crater this year, from 17,070 students in fall 2021 to 15,603, and is down 32 percent since 2010 (23,085).
Not great.
Which brings us back to our central question — how to stop the bleeding? — and how athletics can be an answer.
No one is suggesting it is the answer to a complex problem, and say what you will about the arms race in college sports. Understandably, I’ve heard from UT faculty who question how — given the budget crisis and looming cuts — the university can justify spending $33.8 million on athletics, as it did last year, per federal records.
Still, the return on that investment can be great.
Truth remains, the best way to promote your school, engage alumni, and elevate campus spirit is through that most quintessential of university ideals: beating the hell out of another institution’s football team.
And that translates to student recruitment and retention.
A couple reasons:
■ 1. Sports connects campus
This is especially important at a commuter school like Toledo, where football and basketball games can provide students with a sense of community that might not otherwise exist.
Look at how hoops brought the campus together last winter. A little marketing savvy — see: the Cookie Monster promotion — and a lot of wins turned games into an EVENT. It was awesome. The men’s basketball team averaged 900 students per home game (up from 647 the year before), women’s basketball games averaged a program-record 390 (up from 98 the year before), and the crowds just kept growing.
It’s time to build on that momentum, including with football, which averaged 2,398 students last season.
“It’s way cheaper to retain students than recruit new students, and we can be part of that,” Toledo AD Bryan Blair said. “Whether it’s a Saturday at the Glass Bowl and you’re screaming your face off or you’re in Rowdy Row [at Savage Arena] going crazy, that can be something that makes you feel welcome here and part of something bigger.”
■ 2. Sports provides a bullhorn
Again, this is critical for Toledo.
Maybe White was playing dumb about the Rockets’ success, seeing as he now works for a consulting firm that surely has the secret to BUILDING A BRAND IN FIVE EASY STEPS!
But the university’s enrollment struggles indeed suggest a brand awareness problem.
Which is where sports can lend a hand.
The UT football team, for instance, played in front of a school-record 6.1 million television viewers last season, with each broadcast featuring at least one university commercial, on top of the unofficial infomercial of the game itself.
While this kind of platform is far from a panacea for Toledo, it helps the school stay in sight and in mind. Postel called it marketing that, “we, quite honestly, would have a hard time affording.”
Toledo needs to better capitalize on these opportunities, not to mention keep striving for the kind of breakthrough that would bring truly game-changing exposure.
And here I mean the transcendent stuff, like the football team crashing a New Year’s Six game — as Northern Illinois (Orange Bowl) and Western Michigan (Cotton Bowl) each did in the past decade — or a Sweet 16 hoops run.
I’m not saying Toledo needs a Hail Mary, but consider the Flutie Effect, as detailed by Harvard professor Doug J. Chung in a recent paper titled, “The Dynamic Advertising Effect of Collegiate Athletics.”
He found that:
When a school’s football team goes from being mediocre to being great — as in a playoff contender or the top Group of Five program — applications increase by 18.7 percent. For the same impact, a school would have to either decrease tuition by 3.8 percent or pay its faculty 5 percent more, thus increasing the quality of its education.
“I don’t think everyone appreciates how close we are to punching through,” Blair said.
In the meantime, as Toledo athletics continues to author a good story, the school will keep looking for new ways to publish it.
“I call it Midwest humility,” Blair said. “I don't want to be terribly braggadocios, but I also want to tell the story of all the great things going on at this university. We've got tremendous coaches, tremendous young people, a tremendous campus. We’ve got to start telling about ourselves.”
First Published May 20, 2023, 11:00 a.m.
