Why is it that Univ. keep hiking tuition, cutting programs, don’t offer critical classes because the “enrollment isnt high enough to justify paying the prof”, charge me 150+ for a book, but they can afford to give a fucking coach a giant paycheck like that? I don’t give a fuck how much money the teams make for the schools, that money needs to stay with the school, not go into the pockets of administration and sports teams.
Nice to see priorities are straight here. Fuck this bullshit.
Well, it is for 7 years which would make it just over $1.4 million each year. I don’t know how much money to sports bring to the university so I can’t comment on whether it is too much or not.
Also, it looks like he won’t be getting the money since he has been or will soon be fired.
And I believe that the universities don’t pick the book prices. IIRC, almost all college bookstores are private companies working with the universities. The amount charged for the book is the cost from the publisher (normally a crap-load) plus some profit.
It’s screwed up, certainly, but may make economic sense. A good football coach who can field a good team nets the school a higher degree of visibility, revenue in the form of television broadcast rights, and income from playing in prestige bowl games. Plus, for some reason, grey-haired alumni like a good football team and are willing to pay for it. Can’t say the same thing about the philosophy department.
This is especially true at a school like Alabama. One of my ex-girlfriends is an Alabama alumna, and she is a Crimson Tide football fan and a Christian, in that order. Or, as Bo Jackson once said of former Tide coach Bear Bryant, the only name bigger in the state of Alabama was Jesus Christ.
I’m not endorsing it in any way, but it’s not completely irrational.
Because the university is under pressure from its donations and revenue office to maintain the success and profile of the football and basketball programs, because they get pressure from the alumni that give them all their money and demand successful football and basketball programs.
Frankly, I am quite skeptical that the marginal value of a good coach is worth that many millions of dollars, just as I am skeptical that there is any CEO on the face of the planet who is actually worth $25 million. I am convinced that there are many coaches and business executives who would work for $1 million a year who would do as good a job. But organizations are often irrational about big ticket items like that. And sports makes people REALLY irrational.
Many studies have shown that the economic benefits of college sports are highly questionable, but it’s an article of faith that they make big bux for the schools. There are lots of other examples in the sports world; you will still hear people justifying public spending on sports stadiums on economic grounds despite ample evidence that no sports stadium is ever worth all that public money. You will still hear people justifying Olympic bids on economic grounds despite the fact that every single Olympics ever held has lost money (except the '84 games in L.A., where L.A. robbed the Olympic committee because they were the only city that wanted them.) There’s mounds of evidence that pro sports teams have minimal positive economic impact on a city, but people still insist that they make a city zillions.
Sports are an emotional thing. I absolutely adore the Blue Jays and the Senators; I live and die by their exploits. Why? Well, because I do; there’s no practical reason to. But we have a sort of hidden shame about it, a “Sports don’t REALLY matter” sort of attitude. The truth is, however, that they DO matter to us, for purely emotional reasons. But people want to rationalize their love of sports teams, so they’ll believe any economic rationale you can toss at them.
And that’s why it’s easy to high profile names to extract big salaries from schools and teams. It’s sheer pride and fear of failure with a ehavy dose of half-assed rationalization.
I just think it is fucked that college sports have taken precedents over academics, at state uni no less. Isn’t the NFL, NBA, MLB there for people to make large amounts of bling bling?
It would be different if it didn’t cost 15K a year or so to go to a state uni, but when a student who is there for purely academic reasons is struggling to scrap up the money for the next years tuition hike while Johnny Fucknballs is getting million dollar a year contracts to coach the fucking sports team it makes me mad as fuck.
Im not even going to go into the condition of the dorms at these schools…
Speak for your self. Sports don’t matter a gang raped rat’s ass to me. I cannot remember the last time I sat down and intentionally watched any sport. On rare occasions I’ve sat before the TV while sports were on, but that’s because it was someone else’s TV. Think airports or visiting other people’s homes.
I share RickJay’s doubt of immediate economic impact. But there might be an indirect impact.
My alma mater (Virginia Tech) has become a pretty major football power in the past few years. The year after they went to the national championship game applications increased something like 30%. This allowed the school to become even more selective in admissions. That type of thing helps long-term success of the university. Now, the university was becoming more selective based on academic reputation as well, so it can’t all be credited to the football program. But the football team was part of the reason.
I think the revenues are also used to subsidize the non-revenue sports, so that’s another indirect benefit.
I went to a state school where I was an English tutor for one of the football players. I worked my ass off taking 20 and 21 hours of music classes every semester (which meant that a one hour class could include 5-6 hours of reheasal a week), tutoring, practicing, and going home to waitress on the weekends. I finished with a final GPA of 3.6. Out of this, I received a music scholarship that paid for 3/4ths of my tuition, and took out loans to help with the rest. The kid I tutored was in trouble with the law constantly, rarely did any work for his class, and constantly missed our sessions (meaning that I lost money because I wasn’t able to work). He’s now making millions and millions of dollars playing football for a major NFL team. I’m going back to school next year to get my teaching certification because my degree hasn’t helped me much.
Life’s not fair. I realized that back in college. I’m over it now, but it really hurt to see that some people could be a complete asshole and still make it big, while I felt like every single day was a struggle just to pay my bills when I worked my ass off in college.
Do I think these people deserve the money that they make? No. Do I think that’s going to change anytime soon? No.
Making a few assumptions, but close for Alabama’s situation.
Mediocre team draws ‘only’ 60,000 per game.
Good team draws 75,000 per game.
15,000 fans x $35 per ticket x 7 home games = a difference of $3,675,000 per football season.
That’s without the added benefits of TV, Bowl Games, and public relations.
An outstanding coach that can produce good teams earns much more for his school than would a lower paid coach that produces only average teams.
The school is paying for quality coaching that will produce winning teams. That’s the theory anyway. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
I’m posting out of my butt on this one, but I think I’m correct.
If you want to pre-order tickets to an Alabama football game, you have to belong to a group called Tide Pride. To belong to Tide Pride, you have to be a donor to the university.
So, by having a successful football team, the school can capitalize on the demand for tickets by essentially forcing people to donate to the school to receive tickets. (Actually, just being in Tide Pride doesn’t guarantee you a ticket, either. I’ve heard some of the lower-amount donors saying they weren’t able to get tickets to various games because the games sold out – essentially, the folks who donated more money than them bought all the allotted tickets.)
If you want to talk real idiocy, how about throwing away a $10 million contract for a few lap-dances and (allegedly) one night of sex with two women. It’s almost Gary Hart-like in its stupidity.
Exactly, John Carter. The money the coach is getting paid is probably not coming out of your pocket, Stinkpalm. Nor is it coming out of the classroom budget. The football/basketball teams at many universities are fairly self-sufficient and even make enough to fund other athletic programs or even academic ones.
If your school doesn’t have the money to pay a professor or to modernize it’s probably not because of the athletic department (although sometimes it is). Find another scapegoat.
Do you have any idea how much that school earns just from the football team??
There are TV cntracts, endorsements, bowl games, ticket sales… etc…
If Alabama makes a high level bowl game, that will almost cover the cost of the coach!!
If anything… A good football team will make the school money… not take away from it!!!
The cost of the Coach has NOTHING to do about the cost of education!!
I can think of a few colleges that have enjoyed genuine benefits as a result of successful sports programs. Georgetown and Duke, for instance. They were always superb schools from an academic standpoint, but their success in basketball made them “hot” schools, schools that huge numbers of teens wanted to attend. In the long run, that’s allowed both schools to be more selective and to attract stronger applicants.
But for the most part, the benefits of having a top-notch football or basketball program are dubious. A few points to consider:
School administrators may believe that the success of their football and basketball programs determines how much money they’ll receive in donations from rich alumni. But in reality, the IMPORTANT philanthropists (the people who care about academics, the people who’ll shell out a lot of money to build libraries and science labs) DON’T give sports a second thought when they’re writing their checks. The boosters who ARE obsessed with sports tend to give their donations to the athletic departments, which doesn’t benefit the university as a whole.
To use an example cited by Rick Telander in “The Hundred Yard Lie,” Notre Dame received far more money in alumni contributions during the tenure of hapless Gerry Faust than during the more successful Ara Parseghian or Dan Devine years! Get the idea? People who want to give money to a school will do so regardless of how the football team is doing.
As often as not, schools field football teams due to an irrational sense that “we’re not world-class if we don’t have football.” It’s that same silly insecurity that drives cities like Nashville to shower money on NFL owners. Somehow, cities are terrified of being regarded as “small-time,” and are convinced that the presence of a major sports franchise gives them stature.
There are a HOST of colleges that would do well to scrap their football programs entirely, just as Boston University did. MANY of these football programs have been bleeding money for years. Schools could save a ton of money AND guarantee that they’d NEVER have another Title IX problem by dumping football. But no matter how logical that would be, many school hold on to football, because they fear they won’t be perceived as a “major” school without it.
Never mind that Los Angeles (a genuine “world-class” city) has no NFL team and is doing fine. Never mind that the University of Chicago, as respected a college as any in North America, has thrived without football.
Posting sort of out of my ass here, but one of the people who processed University of Alabama donations is a good friend of mine. She has told me that state funding for the university is a pittance anyway, and the lion’s share of the funding comes from private donations, ususally to the schools from which the alums graduated. Thus, the high-salary-generating schools tend to have more and better facilities.
The UA business school is building an upgrade to its library. The UA geography school is stuck on the second floor of an old, sagging university hall. Why? Geographers don’t make a ton of money, and people can give their money any way they want.
As for the football program, on game day in Tuscaloosa, the city becomes approximately twice as populous as on any other day. Ticket sales pay for the football program, not state funding that could be used for other academic purposes.
Ah, but were they in a campaign during Faust’s tenure? Believe me, as someone who works in the college fundraising biz, it’s impossible to compare campaign years to non-campaign years.
I am of two minds on the issue of successful sports programs and their effect on college fundraising. On one hand, for a few schools, you can ally love for the sports teams to support for the college. At one of my alma maters, Penn State, Coach Paterno has raised millions for the library system, mainly because no one can say no to JoePa. On the other hand, you’ve got to wonder about a lot of the Division I schools, who are spending more on their athletics program than they’re taking in. At the school I work for, our budget isn’t complete for this fiscal year yet, but look at it this way: even our men’s basketball team didn’t recoup its costs in ticket sales, and they’re our most “financially successful” franchise. As for athletic fundraising, we’ve raised so little that we’re thinking of canning athletic fundraising altogether. Our fundraising budget may be better spent raising monies for academic and outreach programs.
We have an alum who’s now coaching in the NBA. Sure, if we threw a million a year at him, he might come back. But even if he did, and we packed our stands every game, and even if we reached the NCAAs for the first time in decades, we still wouldn’t be able to recoup the money. We just don’t have that kind of alumni base.
The way I feel about it is, if Alabama made a conscious decision that Mike Price, or whoever, was worth a $14 million investment, then, sure, go ahead. For all but about 50 schools in the country, though, seven-figure salaries are not on the table.
Kinda a hijack here, but that’s just bad fundraising. UA should be concentrated more on unrestricted gifts, rather than have the schools fighting each other for cash. Sure, “people can give their money any way they want,” but 9 times out of 10, if it’s the Law School sending its gift officer out to a prospect, that check will be made out to the Law School. Whereas, if it’s the central Development Office sending out the gift officer, there’s a much better chance that the prospect will donate “unrestricted” to the University, and the University will be able to apply the money by need, not by want.
Believe me, Alabama (as with any school, or church, or non-profit, or whatever) wants unrestricted gifts. The problem is when the heavy-hitting donor is holding a $10 million check in his or her hands and is saying “Now I’ll give this to you on the condition that it’s spent solely on the business school,” it’s kinda hard to say no.
I’ve worked a little in fundraising, and this happens (although not necessarily on that level) a huge chunk of the time.
Thanks for getting the obligatory “I am superior to you because such things are beneath me” post out of the way. It was inevitable someone would come along for that classic hit and run non-sequitur; would hardly be a sports thread without it. It was a useless and irrelevant post, but it’s sort of a tradition.
Had you read my post I think it was pretty obvious that my point was they matter to enough people that it affects the economy. Billions of tickets to big-name sports events are sold ever year, so it’s a very relevant sociological phenomenon.