If you work in the media, you don't normally have to look too far to find a member of the so-called "Northwestern Mafia." And should you pin down one of these not-very-mysterious characters for a few minutes, you won't have to talk to them for long to get them to say something about the current state of athletics at their alma mater.
Chances are, that something won't be too kind. In the revenue sports, the men's basketball team is the only team in the Big Ten never to have made the NCAA Tournament, and the football team hasn't been to the Rose Bowl since 1995. The Wildcats have been Big Ten co-champions twice since then, but never got the trip to Pasadena, and only finished above .500 in one other season between then and now.
But with the women's lacrosse team about to play for its third consecutive national title, the amount of purple on display in newsrooms has gone up just a bit lately. And a team that plays a distinctly un-Midwestern sport has the rapt attention of the fans in Chicagoland.
"It’s brought a lot of excitement to the university and the athletic program," Northwestern Athletic Director Mark Murphy told me Friday night. "I think within the athletic department, it’s been a real positive sign because it’s showed our other teams they can win."
Now, you might say that it's easier -- and from an administrative perspective, that can easily mean cheaper -- to win a championship in a non-revenue sport if you're a school with the kinds of academic standards Northwestern has. As John Smallwood noted in Friday's Daily News, a lot of schools with smart students and less-than-stellar football teams have found success in lacrosse.
Granted, because the program is fully funded, Northwestern spends $200,000 per lacrosse player on scholarship. Nonetheless, from the simple perspective of roster size, the 20-30 players on a lacrosse team costs less than the 100-plus on a football team, and lacrosse hasn't had the kind of facilities arms race (yet?) that football and basketball teams are currently waging.
At a school whose business program knows quite a bit about how to make profits, maybe it's not much of a surprise that the biggest return has come from one of the athletic department's smaller investments.
