The Goal Summary

The business of sports is one of the fastest growing industries in the country. All over the world, many people participate as players and spectators in a variety of sporting activities, creating opportunities for the marketing of a company’s goods and services. An important part of the business of sports is sports marketing, which revolves around understanding consumer behavior and motivating target markets to purchase goods and services. Sports marketing at Clemson University has many different aspects ranging from sports and technology and sport law to sponsorship and sports economics.

Athletics are a big attraction to many students when looking at colleges. When college sports programs have success, research done by Pope and Pope show that there is a boost in applications that the colleges receive from students. “Applications [after] a Championship add 7-8 percent, with a big effect in the immediate year and little effect after one year.” It was found that when colleges have winning athletic teams get more applications sent in from all levels of student and not just athletes. This is found true for basketball and football. Not only increase in applications is found but also found after success in football there is a growth in enrollment, this is not found true for basketball (Getz and Siegfried “What Does Intercollegiate Athletics Do…”). “David Schmidly the president of the University of New Mexico said “One of the most effective ways to market your university nationally is to have a really quality athletic program. It helps recruit faculty, students, and donors. It helps with the image of the whole university.” (qtd. in Getz and Siegfried “College Sports: The Mystery of the Zero-Sum Game.”)

It is stressed in the Goal that there is a massive difference between throughput and efficiency. The novel makes the case that having an efficient operation does not equate to profitability. What does equate to profitability is to increase the throughput of any given operations system. Jonah tells Alex, “Throughput, is the rate in which the system generates money through sales.” (Goldratt, E.M. (2014), The Goal, pg. 60). Jonah goes on to explain to Alex that inventory is all the money that was invested in purchasing things that the system intends to sell. (Id). Furthermore, operational expenses are those costs that are required to turn inventory into throughput. (Id, at pg. 61). The definitions of these three measurements are not standard definitions for an MBA student. It is an interesting perspective on how to view operations.

If a college athlete is helping publicize the school, they are attracting attention and possible income to their university.

As profits from college sports continuously surge each year, people fail to realize that the school's athletic program wouldn't be prosperous without the many achievements of its elite athletes. Athletes deserve the credit in how much publicity a school gets; has effects on the ticket sales and purchase of sports merchandise.

As college athletic revenues have skyrocketed over the past decade, the controversial question of whether college athletes should be compensated still remains. In the United States over 100,000 collegiate athletes participate in a variety of different sports across the country and do not receive financial compensation for their performances. Dating back to the 1800’s, intercollegiate athletics have played a very important role in American life, not only for the players but for fans as well. Ranked among the most popular sports in the United States, “College football alone attracted its third-highest attendance total ever with 48,958,547 fans in 2012” (National Collegiate Athletics Association, 2013). Intercollegiate athletics is defined as “involving or involved in competition between colleges”.

The month of March may be the largest stage for the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The basketball tournament known as “March Madness”, brings in publicity, as well as revenue for the schools. People may ask, “why is this college basketball tournament so popular?” The answer is, it is the student athletes that make it exciting to watch. The athletic director for student services at Kansas State University, Phil Hughes, calls the student athletes “The Entertainment Product” (Varsity Green 13). The nickname may sound rash or rude, however he is right. The student athletes attract the crowds, that lead to sold out arenas. Hughes’ office is in a $1 million facility in the academic learning center at KSU, right next to the $2 million football facility (Varsity Green 14). If it were not for the publicity and revenue from the big-stage events for KSU, there would not be any million dollar facilities for the students and coaches to enjoy.

For 150 years, college sports have been an important aspect of American universities and abolishing them would eliminate the benefits that they bring (“College Athletics Programs”). One of the greatest benefits of college athletics is that they bind the school to the community. People who live in a college town love to support their institution and showing up at numerous athletic events displays how far their dedication goes. Not only do college sports attract people who live in the college town, but also alumni and future students. The school’s spirit and unity extends far beyond the

Over the past few years, college athletics has grown immensely, gaining an infinite amount of supporters with no signs of slowing down. Today, sports are no longer just sports; they are becoming a business, leaving the athletes with no profit. The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a multi-billion-dollar organization that would not exist without athletes around the country. Each year, just like the popularity, the revenues that each college makes off athletics also increase but the athletes do not receive any of the compensation despite their work and sacrifices. Throughout one year alone, a division one university’s athletic departments can bring in a revenue that ranges anywhere from $70,000,000 to $180,000,000. This revenue consists of multiple aspects; not just ticket sales. College programs also bring in millions from television and

Across the nation, these sponsors uniformly regarded sport as an educational and developmental undertaking (Hearn, Thomas K.). The main premier sports for men are football, basketball, and baseball. These sports help teach teamwork and let people interact with others. This change in the culture of sport is destructive of the aims of athletics as part of the mission of the university (Hearn, Thomas K.). Sports weren’t this advanced when they first started the game.

The “contradiction at the heart of big-time college football,” as Michael Oriard describes it, is the competing demands of marketing and education. The 1890s proved to university administrators that there was an enormous market for collegiate football, which postulated opportunities for university building. Since this ubiquitous realization, there has coincided this blatant, yet unchanging contradiction that academic institutions are permitted to profit off of the services provided by its student-athletes while the athletes must idly accept that they are amateurs, donating their efforts to their respective schools. The schools then direct this revenue toward strengthening their athletic departments, and thus continues this seemingly endless growth of big-time college sports, all while athletes remain uncompensated and academics continue to take a backseat.

The book The Goal, written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, is about the manufacturing process and how it works together to achieve the goals of a firm. The Goal is about science and education. It is an attempt to show that we can postulate a very small number of assumptions and utilize them to explain a very large spectrum of industrial phenomena. The Goal is about new global principles of manufacturing and people thinking logically and consistently about their problems and therefore able to determine “cause and effect” relationships between their actions and the results. In the process some of the characters in the book, Alex Rogo - who is the plant manager, Jonah - a physicist and old friend of Alex, Stacey Patazenik – who manages inventory

The career of a sport management professional offers a large number of various positions. One such career is that of a director who specializes in promotion and development. “Promotion and development directors are hired by sports teams and school athletic programs to design and implement promotional campaigns that will increase ticket sales” (Sports Management 1). The biggest part of their job is to provide a profit for the organization they are working for. Directors set up opportunities for the sports team to make money off of sponsors. They also set up deals with advertisers to pay a sum of money in exchange for their ads or products to be listed or shown at their sporting event (Sports Management 1). Good advertising and production of cash flow go hand in hand while promotion directors try to help them to succeed. Development and promotion directors play an important role in developing a profit for their organizations.

“The Goal” is a book written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox in 1984. The book is very famous in the management field. In 2004, the author published the third revision of it and celebrated selling over than three million copied of it around the world. Also, the goal book is taught in over than 120 collages. The book was recommended by my professor to be read and summarize as an extra credit.

Sports' marketing is a comparatively new field and dimension within the broad concept of marketing. It is continuously evolving and changing today as society combats the free market to decide the legal and ethical limitations of business today. It is significant to note that this discipline within marketing is not clearly defined. Sports today use corporate sponsorships and television money in order to contend and pay for top quality athletes. Those companies use teams, leagues, colleges, and individuals to make a distinction between their products in a very aggressive business environment. What makes up sports marketing to one person could be considered selling out to another. The business world keeps pushing to find a competitive advantage and the sports world has in general welcomed the money offered (Weikel, n.d.).