Indeed. I recall a bit of very sardonic wit I heard some 25 years ago to the effect that: “The State of Texas charters an extensive network of professional sports franchises. To avoid conflict with the NFL, NBA, etc., they are allowed to disguise themselves as universities.” :dubious:
The problem is of course not limited to Texas, though it provides the stereotypical examples of such behavior.
The one point on which I would differ with Martin’s excellent analysis is that in fact in the Federal government and many states, the relevant constitution mandates that the legislature appropriate any expenditures. So his profitable state park program and university athletic department require that the legislature authorize the expenditure of their direct income, even on the programs that generated that income, since it is the state expending money. This is generally pretty much pro forma for those who are aware of the requirement, and only becomes news when it needs to be spelled out for someone wondering why the austerity program doesn’t impact X.
I have some pretty strong feelings about college sports and coaches’ salaries, but since this is in GQ, not Great Debates or the Pit, I have thus far tried to restrict my attention to facts.
But, in the interest of full disclosure, no, I don’t have a 5 year contract, and yes, I think a coach making anything more than the highest paid professor (around $174,000) is stupid. I know it will never change, but that’s my opinion. If in some magical fantasy land where video games (my personal passion) held the position that regular sports do today, I would also think it stupid for a “video game coach” to make a million dollars.
Martin Hyde gave a pretty thorough answer. I guess it depends on whether the program is self funding, and if not, where the money to fill the gap comes from. I just looked at the budget for my university and it defines “Auxiliary Funds” as:
“Funds used to provide services for students, faculty, and staff which generally charge a fee directly related to the cost of the service provided (e.g. athletics, residence halls, hospitality services, traffic & parking, etc.) No state funds can be used to support auxiliary operations.”
(bolding mine)
So, you weren’t aware that different people have different interests and different priorities?
Then you should consider getting a job at a small liberal arts college that doesn’t care about division 1 athletics. Your alumni and most of the current student body (your customers) do.
Maybe “amaze” was a poor word choice, but it is an approximation of how I feel every time I hear that somebody decided to make a decision that has major life consequences because School A plays a certain game better than School B. As I said, I believe that I’m a fairly empathetic person, but when it comes to sports, I’m at a complete loss. Maybe the frustration of not being able to revert to my usual empathetic mode makes me feel “amazed.”
The closest thing I can find is video games, which I love. But, as I hinted at before, even in a fantasy land where video games had the same social power that sports do, I cannot find a way to justify paying even the best player or “video game coach” (whatever that job would look like) a million dollars a year.
It may sound like I’m bitter, but I’m really not (okay, maybe a little, because my area of interest is academics). Mostly, I just don’t understand.
Thanks for the (unsought) career advice. I would work at a D1 school if I found the right position. This wasn’t intended to be a sports rant. I was just honestly curious about the economics of the whole thing. You seemed to want to debate about whether Tuberville earns his salary. Maybe he does–I have no idea what a coach does. But I would also say that the university staff that might be laid off due to budget cuts also “earn every bit” of their meager salaries. I wasn’t trying to debate this point.
ETA: Okay, I admit. I’ve mentioned the salary thing a couple of times now. So, I’ll revise my statement to read: “I didn’t *intend *for this thread to be a debate about salaries.”
But each division 1 school only has has one head football coach. They have numerous professors and graduate assistants. The school can’t justify firing their only head coach or doing away with football for a couple of seasons. They can cut out a few philosophy classes or double up the size of that freshman biology class for a few years.
It’s not up for debate whether he earns his salary. It’s a fact that he brings in way more money than anyone else save for the president of the school. It’s a fact he earns his salary. I don’t know the specifics of Tuberville in particular, but most big time coaches do earn their salaries because of the money they rake in.
Look at Joe Paterno (at Penn State, for the uninitiated). He’s basically a walking zombie. He’s not making decisions, he’s not actually coaching, he’s just there. Why is he there? People love him and he won big time in the past so he’s a figurehead, a symbol of past glory. His son runs the show, but JoePa is always there, giving confidence to the donors.
Trust me, I’m not a college football fan. But to say after this whole thread “hmmm, I *just dunno *if D1 college coaches earn their salaries” is to ignore everything we’ve said.
Furthermore, big shot professors earn way more than their salaries. They publish popular books that supplement their income, they give speaking tours, etc.
Here is a relevant article from ESPN. Basically, men’s football and basketball are the only programs that have a shot at making money, and even then close to half of them are money losers.
A coach does not “earn his salary” simply because the program they coach rakes in more than is spent on the program. They earn their salary if the difference between the money they bring in and the amount that would be brought in by a replacement coach is bigger than the difference between their salary and that of a replacement coach. That is, if the coach earns $1.5 million and generates $2 million in revenues, and you could replace the coach with one earning $500 thousand who brought in $1.2 million, then the first coach is costing you $200 thousand and is not earning his salary.
Of course, figuring this all out – particularly the effect on alumni contributions would be difficult – but that simply means it’s hard to tell is if a coach is earning h9is salary or not.
Don’t discount the idea that people want to go to a school not just because they want to root for a better team, but instead figure it out that better teams = more money for the entire school. So just because someone doesn’t like sports, it doesn’t mean they don’t see the “trickle down” effect a good sports program can have for everyone at the school.
Good athletics is another way to get the alumni to stay active within the school, an keep their checkbooks active. Just because an alumni loves the football team doesn’t mean he doesn’t also love a new science lab.
And as someone else mentioned, athletics profits don’t just go to athletics. They go elsewhere in the school.
A good athletics program with high-performance teams might make a prospective student think there will be better facilities, lower tuition and better chances for funding. It doesn’t just mean “yay! we win games!”
This is a rather absurd claim. First, almost every college and university in the U.S. is explicitly non-profit. They do worry about something like the bottom line of course, because they have to have revenues to meet their cost.
But even if you wish to argue that you didn’t mean “profit-making” in that literal sense, they are still very much in the education business. Your statement is akin to saying General Motors is not in the automobile business, but is a profit-making (OK maybe GM was a bad choice) business devoted to the bottom line.
I am always amazed when I encounter people who don’t consider athletics to be a part of a good education at any level. It’s always been a part of education. How long have Oxford and Cambridge been competing in boat races and track and cricket? Lafayette and Lehigh have been playing each other in football every year since 1884.
Athletics is part of turning out a well-rounded individual, which is the mission of Universities, not to just turn out nerds and geeks. Why is it that you never hear complaints about the arts programs? “I can’t believe this person spends four years painting pictures, or prancing around on stage in tights, or blowing into a trombone.” Yet you hear similar things about athletes all the time.
For probably 90%+ of the people who graduate college, it’s just a mandatory 4-5 year investment to get a piece of paper they need to get a job. It’s also a good place to meet people and to figure out what you want to do with your life. The culture of the school, which includes things like its athletic culture, should factor in for most students.
If you know from high school that you want to be an English professor and you really want to take classes taught by someone prominent in that field, it makes sense to go to the school where that professor is. However, by and large most people aren’t in that situation.
A dirty thing most high priced schools do not like to admit is that you can get an excellent education from any accredited four year school in the United States. You can go on to have a great career from lots of schools that aren’t small, elite, and super-expensive.
The Big 12 Conference TV contract brings Texas and Texas A&M $20 million per year eachAND gives UT the right to pursue its own TV contract for even more $$$.
As a point of reference, $20MM is about half the entire budgetof the college my son graduated from. We’re talking really big business here.
This isn’t GD but I’ll say that by and large people get paid what the market thinks they are worth.
If college professors think they can make more than the $200,000+ that many of them make, I invite them to go look into the private sector. The truth of the matter is that is a very high compensation. For example, contrary to what most people think the CEOs of most corporations don’t make more than $500,000 a year (remember there are far more non-Fortune 500 companies than Fortune 500 companies.)
If anything the college professor labor market is very guild-like, and thus the labor rates are not the result of an especially free market. Given the system is stacked against new people getting into the field, that creates a certain artificial scarcity.
Not too long ago the average football coach didn’t make much more than $100,000 a year. Then, some big schools started shelling out big compensation packages to attract big name coaches. Suddenly every school at the Division IA level is now in competition for a very limited pool of persons. That drives the price up, it’s a result of genuine scarcity and it’s basically irrelevant whether someone feels that is “fair.” Markets aren’t fair or unfair, they simply reflect the collective valuations of all the participants.
I will say this, though, a college professor typically has very few supervisory duties. They educate, they assist, they research/publish. They might have a few TAs or research assistants that work for them. Obviously a few select professors might oversee very large research departments or programs (but most professors aren’t deans or department heads, given the pyramidal shape of your typical college department’s org chart.) A professor is thus a teacher / researcher who oversees typically a very small team of employees (if any.)
A college football coach has around 100 players who directly answer to him. Unlike students in a classroom, the coach can tell those players what to do and has a great deal of control and responsibility for them. If an English student gets drunk and drives and gets busted for DUI, no one goes to the English professor looking for explanations. If a football player does, the coach is the first person who gets asked about it. In addition to that, the coach is the boss of a large staff of coordinators and assistant coaches, in addition to auxiliary staff.
A college football coach is a senior level manager. They make a lot more than most senior level managers, but it’s not really reasonable to expect them to make the same as a professor who has no public speaking, public relations, student personnel management, and et cetera responsibilities. The coaching job is a bigger, more important job with more responsibilities.
Something from that article I found interesting:
I was under the impression that arts programs are always the first to be cut in most schools across the board–primary, secondary, and post-secondary. A lot of people have the attitude that you mention: that arts are pointless wastes of time that don’t prepare anyone for the real world. Perhaps if we lived in a world where arts got the lion’s share of funding and athletics always got the shaft, I’d be asking why we can’t cut arts funding. Hard to say.
Although I’ve said that I don’t care for sports, I do know intellectually that athletics is important. People need to be active to be healthy, and it’s mostly harmless fun for those who enjoy it. I don’t really wish that all sports in college would be eliminated tomorrow. I was just wondering about the economics of the whole collegiate athletics thing, and why it’s usually not (except for the case of Iowa above) on the chopping block. I’ve gotten several good answers and lots of food for thought on this.
I wasn’t planning on getting involved in this thread, but this really needs a cite. I am a college professor, and of all of the other professors I’ve met at several dozen universities, I don’t know a single one making over $200,000. In fact, the vast majority makes under $70,000. (Yes, even tenured full professors). I understand all I have is anecdotal, but the “guild-like” structure of academia drives salaries down. When I took my current position, I had two tenure-track offers, both below $45,000. I had an offer to interview for a non-academic position which would have paid over $80,000. This is the rule in academia, not the exception.
Martin did a great job explaining a lot of the college athletics economics question. I few other things I would add…
First, most big-time intercollegiate athletic programs don’t make much money, or make money at all. In fact, the school where I work is one of the few profitable athletic departments in the country. They make enough scratch to not only cover their expenses but have some left over. Football, in particular, is the cash cow - it makes enough to cover the deficits from every intercollegiate sport. Even basketball loses money (though with Texas’ recent successes it’s probably very little, or is even edging to break even). There was an article recently, I can’t remember where, that explained how although Alabama won the national championship last year, they actually lost money on the BCS bowl game because of their revenue sharing deal with the SEC and the fact that they brought umpteen million students and staff to the trip as well.
The link between successful athletics and a school’s reputation is fairly tenuous. I’d have to look the studies up but I know the impact of athletics is often overstated. That is, schools don’t typically see a huge increase in applications when they win a championship, move to a more competitive division, etc. The Rutgers athletic department made that claim after their dream season about 5 years ago and sunk a whole lot of cash into upgrading their facilities - I don’t think it’s panned out they way they hoped.
It’s undeniable that being on TV Saturdays gives your university exposure, which means that counselors, parents, and trusted adults know the school’s name. And believe it or not, there are a lot of students that want to attend a school that has a competitive sports program. I doubt that anyone makes the decision solely on this, but it’s definitely a plus factor.
And the bulk of the cash that flows through athletics is generated through auxiliary means. Most of the budgetary appropriations for athletics that the university controls is for the academic support side of things. So there’s little chance of the coach getting his salary cut, but it’s entirely possible that the counselors and trainers could.
Bottom line, why do Tuberville and Brown get paid millions? Because they can. That’s the market value for coaches of their caliber. Alums and boosters are all too happy to donate to the cause.
I remember reading an article a while back that stated that a number of midwestern states, like Nebraska and Iowa, had college athletics coaches as their highest paid state employees - more than university presidents, agency directors, and governors.
Even as an academic I can’t say I have a huge problem with the economics of college athletics. Higher education has a real challenge in communicating what it is that we do to the populace, unless you have a family member who’s in college and you can see the value of the experience. Yes, we produce research and patents that make your life better, but that’s sort of abstract. Alumni, parents, and ordinary folk who like our colors flock to campus for events, and we can shoehorn the occasional message about our outstanding students, great faculty, and high-caliber staff. I have a number of colleagues who are quite irrational about athletics and are forever mounting crusades to dismantle athletics… they are regarded as kooks. At least at my university, athletics isn’t going anywhere.