Academic

The Financial Crisis Bails Out Auburn Football

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

The WSJ law blog has some nice research on the relationship between Colonial Bank and Auburn University, through its CEO, the most powerful sports booster in America.  He hired and fired every football coach and president at the university since 1983.  He has an oppo blog.  And, as the WSJ notes, Auburn's best two years, when it finished ranked 9th and 4th, were in 1993 and 1994, the years that Colonial reported its largest number of total assets (though the numbers look weird - Colonial blew up those two years, then shrank rapidly, and didn't really recover until the housing boom).  But the CEO was so involved in Auburn that the university was put on probation by an accrediation agency, and the team isn't doing well any more.

Full post as published by Conglomerate on August 18, 2009 (boomark / email).