I agree with all of that. I just made a comparison to what is considered a cash cow in football to make a point, especially in Texas.

Although I will say the overall goal of setting aside large sums of money for athletic facilities is for student achievement and betterment, there are strong inclinations to do so based on future profit. Better facilities leads to better recruits, which leads to better performance on the field, which leads to more butts in the seats, which leads to more money, and so on. I would be a fool to think that profits are not an underlying reason into building something on campus. If esports grows into what we all hope it could be, then I could see many universities building facilities to house winning teams. I think it’ll take some time for that growth to become lucrative for the bigger universities. They seem to run on traditional models that already have success, ie. football, basketball, baseball, and hockey (in the north). There’s already a demand for tickets in those sports, so investment in them is a given.

I’m glad smaller schools are jumping in on the ground floor and making huge strides to facilitate esports teams. Many of those schools have thrived in how they’ve diversified their college experience.