Perhaps the most dog-bites-man headline of this last weekend of regular season NFL play came atop stories on Jim Harbaugh’s move from the San Francisco 49ers to the University of Michigan. Nearly all of those stories, before and after the news became official, mentioned Harbaugh’s expected salary: $8,000,000/year, a sum that would make him the highest paid coach in the history of college football, though the latest reports suggest that even that staggering figure is low.
Just for the perverse pain of it, I decided to do a few sums. The University of Michigan charges slightly lower instate tuition for its 1st and 2nd year undergraduates than it does for juniors and seniors. The average of the two comes to $14,336. Taking the original $8 million number for Harbaugh’s salary, that translates into 558 tuition-free rides for Michigan kids.
University of Michigan faculty salaries in 2013 range from an average of roughly $88,000 for assistant professors to an average number around $149,000. Picking a figure more or less in the middle, and adding in an allowance for benefits, Harbaugh’s reported salary would cover the cost of about 50 faculty — with, among other things, the benefit to the university and society of the research such an addition to the Wolverines capacity to study science, medicine, engineering, social science and the humanities might provide.
To add yet one more comparison: even in an age of administrative bloat, Harbaugh’s compensation comes to more than the pay given Michigan’s top 16 executives, or all 20 of its deans.
Apples and oranges, football boosters might reply, and they’re right. NCAA Division 1 football, at least within a major conference, has revenue streams not available to a mere Dean of Engineering or the College of Literature, Science and the Arts. It’s plausible to me that between TV contracts, merchandise and the rest, the University of Michigan may indeed make a profit on its football operation. (I’m not sure, though. I’ve spent enough time in and around the film industry to know that before you simply accept that claim, you have to see the real books on anything as rich in opportunities for financial legerdemain as a big time entertainment business.)*
But even if the king’s ransom Jim Harbaugh will now collect doesn’t rob the rest of the university, and would in any event be simply unavailable to any other initiative at the University of Michigan, still, it seems to me useful to pay attention to the scale of that salary against the costs of what are, after all, the core of what a university does. That would be to educate young adults and to create knowledge valuable in both a practical and liberal sense of value. Michigan remains a great university, and I’ll be bursting with pride when my nephew graduates in Ann Arbor next year. And, of course, Michigan is hardly the only football-mad school; it’s just the latest to hit the headlines with a monstrous expression of what it as a microcosm of society prices and hence prizes most richly.
In the end, I guess this whole post is a “get offa my lawn you kids” kind of plaint. As a society we are so committed to a primitive market view of human relations that I can hear myself telling me that this is simply what the bourse will bear for a top name in a small, big-money field. There’s a lot of ways to parse that thought for bullshit, of course, but just the fact that I frame it that way before catching myself shows how thoroughly the Reagan revolution has defined our categories of thought. I will say, though, that the history of decline-and-falls is littered with examples of the already-rich alienating yet more resources from things that actually build the wealth and power of a society.
Oh well.
*I don’t know how to factor in the question of alumni fund raising, because I know of no way to calculate the crowding out problem: how much cash raised for athletics either fosters or crowds out possible support for academics. If anyone has any insight on this — pop it into the comments, please.
Image: Henri Rousseau, The Football Players, 1908 And yeah, I know. Not that football. But I couldn’t resist such gaily prancing young sportsmen. Could you?
Citizen Alan
But I couldn’t resist such gaily prancing young sportsmen.
This is what I imagine the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog looked like during the Taft administration.
richard mayhew
Take a look at how Northeastern’s donation patterns changed when they dropped football a while back — different donors, same amount of money IIRC.
Crowding out is not an issue.
Gin & Tonic
It’s an ideal expression of America. The business is a cartel, built on taxpayer capital, which produces nothing of any actual value and uses disposable unpaid labor. It’s perfect.
I’m too
busylazy to actually look it up, but in how many of the 50 states is the state university’s football coach the highest-paid state employee? More than a dozen?No, I’m not a football fan, why do you ask?
richard mayhew
Oh yes, here is the relevant article from the Boston Globe:
http://www.boston.com/sports/colleges/football/articles/2010/10/03/yes_theres_life_after_football/?page=full
Basically, football as a brand identifier probably makes sense in the SEC, but the Big-10 on the whole are top tier research universities in addition to being football factories…
Amir Khalid
I take it the University of Michigan is owned and largely funded by the state. My naive self expects that a state government should have a pay scale. How is Harbaugh’s salary not subject to such a scale?
Cervantes
Possibly outdated but still possibly of interest.
charluckles
“Apples and oranges, football boosters might reply, and they’re right. NCAA Division 1 football, at least within a major conference, has revenue streams not available to a mere Dean of Engineering or the College of Literature, Science and the Arts. It’s plausible to me that between TV contracts, merchandise and the rest, the University of Michigan may indeed make a profit on its football operation. (I’m not sure, though. I’ve spent enough time in and around the film industry to know that before you simply accept that claim, you have to see the real books on anything as rich in opportunities for financial legerdemain as a big time entertainment business.)*”
This, this and this again. We are going through a similar situation with my alma mater and a large capital purchase. The most infuriating thing has been the hand waving and dismissiveness with which proponents of the football program have greeted legitimate concerns from the opposition. People who would be skeptical of a large project like this from a private corporation let alone a government agency are willing to believe what appears to me to be very questionable assumptions because it involves the particular flavor of entertainment that they are fanatical about.
Tom Levenson
@richard mayhew: Thanks. I should have said I was too lazy to look this kind of work up, rather than “I know of no way…” ;-)
Bass
@Gin & Tonic: here in AZ, our highest paid state employee is the U of Arizona’s basketball coach. :(
Vtr
A couple of weeks ago, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, cited as that state’s largest employer, cancelled its football “program.” The University said it was doing so because it would cost $5 billion over the next five years the maintain the team.
Cervantes
@Amir Khalid:
The Board of Regents has some power and discretion.
japa21
@Gin & Tonic: I don’t have the time to check on it, but I saw a chart last year that indicates in 47 out of 50 states, the highest paid public employee is either a football or basketball coach.
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
Exemptions.
Simple as that. The football boosters have politics in their pockets. It’s why you see most places will give tax relief to stadiums and sometime pay for them. It’s supposedly prestige to have a college or professional team in your town.
Cervantes
@japa21:
Your chart, maybe.
Gin & Tonic
@Cervantes: This is a really odd clause in that statute
Maybe they should also require a professor of astrology in the department of physics.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
According to Deadspin, it’s more than two dozen. In another dozen, it’s a basketball coach. In most of the rest, it’s either a college president or somebody in their medical school. In every single state, the highest paid state employee works at a university.
Mustang Bobby
I’m an alum of three universities with large football programs: University of Miami, University of Minnesota, and University of Colorado. They all hit me up for donations and I politely tell them that when the university increases the budget of the theatre departments, where I spent my time, by a factor of 1% of the budget they spend on football, they’ll get my attention. Until then, rah-rah-sis-boom-blah.
Amir Khalid
@Cervantes:
That last clause, about the department of medicine, was really something. Granted, the act dates to 1851, but a professor of homeopathy? Is that post currently occupied?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@richard mayhew: The University of Chicago went through the “trauma” of giving up its Big10 football program in 1939. Chicago was a powerhouse, basically a farm team for the Bears. The first Heisman Trophy winner, etc., etc. Robert Maynard Hutchins dropped football because he saw it as a distraction from the University’s mission. He was right.
The UofC is in Division III athletics now.
Cheers,
Scott.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Gin & Tonic: Really odd is an understatement. And I am sadly too lazy (at the moment at least) to research Amir Khalid’s Q re: current professor of homeopathy.
Roger Moore
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Division III is the only place in college where the athletes are genuinely amateurs. The stuff about preserving amateurism that’s used to impose crazy rules on Div I and Div II athletes is just so much distraction to avoid paying them a real salary.
Frankensteinbeck
Didn’t we see an article recently specifically saying that these big, expensive sports teams are money losers, not money gainers? As @charluckles points out, this is about emotional needs and tribal pride, and everything else is a cover.
kindness
Yea well the money being paid is obscene. For my purposes though I am hard pressed to see any better coaches out there for my 49ers than the one just shown the door. I fear my team will see a repeat of the blighted years. I always find it odd that owners (and their lackeys) seem to think of themselves as football geniuses and think nothing of tossing good coaches. Of course there were issues with the 9ers. But I don’t see an upside yet.
Gin & Tonic
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): A few minutes of “research” shows that that clause generated a great deal of controversy, and that the homeopathic medical school ended in the 1920’s.
MattF
It’s not just the money. There’s lots of bad stuff happening in university sports. Margaret Soltan (aka UD) has been on the case for a while:
http://www.margaretsoltan.com
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Roger Moore: The previous head of the Smithsonian Institution made $900,000 a year before he was forced out. The present head makes around $550,000 (more than Obama).
(The SI gets 70% of its operating budget from the Federal Government.)
Cheers,
Scott.
CONGRATULATIONS!
College sports is fucking bullshit. Football in particular. It takes resources from the academic world and gives them to trustees, coaches and TV networks. Ban it all. Let the NFL draft out of high schools and get their future concussion suicides while they’re still young.
Cervantes
@Gin & Tonic:
It is.
It took the Legislature four years to force that language into the statute and another twenty years to force the creation of a (medical) college entirely dedicated to homeopathy. Both things were achieved through the power of the purse, over the objection of the Faculty and at the cost of the university president’s resignation.
Omnes Omnibus
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Ever spend any time around D-III sports?
Randy Khan
I have mixed feelings about college sports. On one level, they’re a huge money and attention sink, and the truth is that most schools lose money on their sports programs (football being worst of all). At big time schools, the sports programs often also create significant moral and ethical problems. And of course there is a fine argument that sports programs are not really part of the schools’ missions.
At the same time, though, it’s hard to deny that sports are an important part of American culture, that there are positive lessons to be learned from participation in sports and that, strangely, the way the law works in the U.S., it turns out that football provides a ton of opportunities for young women to play that might not otherwise be available to them, nearly all in sports that don’t have anything like the problems that football has. (And, as it happens, the people who play those other sports turn out to be pretty loyal donors to their alma maters.) Also, as it turns out, there are positive outcomes when a school’s sports teams do well, notably in increased applications. (I think the research on the impact of success on donations is mixed, although I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong about that.)
I’m also wary of the “not part of the mission” claims. It seems to me that you could make that argument about any number of elements of the college environment that help make it a growth experience, and that have a lot less support than football. The chess team, the debate team, the film society and the student radio station all often have little to do with a school’s academic mission, yet they are important to some students, and a key element of the college experience for them and others. From a personal philosophical perspective, I don’t want to make college into a purely functional experience. Just as I worry about the emphasis on STEM pushing aside the humanities (even though I was a biochem major myself), I worry about the idea that college is viewed as, essentially, a pre-career job, with no opportunity to use it to learn about yourself and grow.
Roger Moore
I’m deeply suspicious of the claims about alumni giving as well. I know that the vast majority of the money my alma mater brings in from donations comes from a handful of ultra-rich donors giving money in 8 and even 9 digit chunks. When I was a student and brought in to hit up alumni for donations, we were explicitly told that the size of the donation was unimportant. The school cared more about getting money from a large percentage of alumni than getting many absolute dollars from them because a high alumni giving rate was useful in convincing big money donors to open their wallets. I work for a non-profit now, and I know that there is something of the same dynamic anywhere that depends on donations; it only takes one mega-money donation to equal an enormous number of small money donations.
FlipYrWhig
I say this every time, but: there’s no good reason for sports to have anything to do with universities. Just have clubs, the way they play soccer worldwide, and pay the players. I don’t see why the University of Michigan has to have anything to do with Wolverines Football Club, who should be able to hire, fire, pay, and schedule whatever they feel like. If it’s profitable, bully for them. If not, oh well, them’s the breaks. And let’s knock off the bullshit in big-time sports where you have to pretend to be a student to be an athlete, but then your coaches treat you like a full-time athlete. We don’t make musicians and actors go to college. If they’re good enough, they work, and get paid, and then they Get An Education if and when they feel like it. I don’t see why sports should be different.
smintheus
Time to hire a bunch more adjuncts.
SRW1
When it comes to the salaries of sports stars (or in this case coaches), I fall back on the late Douglas Adams and imagine a highly developed intergalactic race sending a secret exploratory mission to judge the development level of human civilization and come to a conclusion of whether there might be any argument against pulverizing it to built that intergalactic highway.
If the verdict of that exploration were to go by how humans remunerate activities carried out by other humans and how we treat our biosphere, there would be no way to avoid the assumption that the Vogon coinstruction fleet must already be on its way.
Btw, anybody seen my emergency blanket?
Tree With Water
“It’s plausible to me that between TV contracts, merchandise and the rest..”.
TV uprooted the proportional sensibilities that once confined pro football to hard core fans across the country. As a kid, I watched 49er games in a small municipal stadium known for hosting high school venues. Take a close look at the stadiums next time you watch film of games in the ’60’s and ’70’s, and its the same story. TV money opened the sluice gate and greed continues to ride the wave (waves from sluice gates?). What amuses me about the NFL is how the clowns that run the league attribute their financial windfall as owing to their superior business acumen. There’s really nothing amusing about similar conceits being held by academies of learning. You’d think they above all would play it smart (or smarter), but they don’t, do they? Money will corrupt, and feel free to quote me.
raven
yawn
FlipYrWhig
@Randy Khan: I would find your argument more persuasive if there was a lot of evidence that athletes at the big-time sports programs are also doing a reasonable level of academic work. From what I can gather, it seems like there’s a lot of fictive and minimal make-work to keep up their eligibility. I think there’s a huge difference between “Econ major who takes (and passes) a normal course load and also plays football” and “football player who goes through the motions of enrolling in courses in general studies so that he can practice with the team and keep his scholarship.”
Redshift
@Roger Moore:
Other than the Ivy League. One of my favorite facts from when I was there is that our star running back was majoring in Molecular Biology.
raven
The Athletic Snowball
By Corbin, Charles B. 1977.
same as it always was
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
Not any longer. The state of Michigan has continuously cut its appropriation to all of the state universities but to the University of Michigan especially. As of the 2013-14 year, the state appropriation was less than 4% of the school’s revenues. The University of Michigan has effectively become a private university that happens to charge the residents of its state lower tuition than it does to those from out of state. It’s been a sad progression to watch but the school has weathered it better than most other public universities that have watched their appropriations dwindle.
I’ll start the next segment of my comment by saying that I do think the overvaluing of athletics is a serious problem all over. However, a bit of context will show that an $8 million salary for Harbaugh can probably be justified looking at a marginal revenue approach. They host seven football games a year and typically sell about 105,000 tickets for each one. After the two recent fiascoes of hiring Rich Rodriguez and then Brady Hoke, ticket sales have started to slip badly and they’ve started to cut the price of tickets as a result. If Harbaugh is successful and can produce a situation in which Michigan can charge even $10 more per ticket sold, that would come close to covering his entire salary. Given his long track record going back to the University of San Diego of being an outstanding coach, this is reasonably likely. So he will likely bring in more money than it costs to pay him.
Also, Tom shouldn’t be so skeptical about football making money at Michigan. It’s one of the few schools in the country where the athletic department as a whole doesn’t receive any sort of subsidy from the university’s general fund. It’s the football program and, to a lesser extent, the men’s basketball and hockey programs that make that possible. So, while skepticism about athletic department accounting is, in general, warranted, in this particular case it isn’t necessary.
charluckles
@Roger Moore:
It’s infuriating that public institutions like universities are utilizing more and more of their resources to chase donations from a tiny subset of ultra wealthy citizens while moving towards a business model that uses and abuses their employees.
gene108
@Amir Khalid:
Stephen Fry, the British comic/actor, did a tour of America in 2008 for a T.V. show.
His summary of an American college football game here.
Football is just as big a sport at the University of Michigan as it is at Auburn University or the University of Alabama. The U of M football stadium seats 110,000 people. The population of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the university has its main campus is about 117,000. They usually fill the stadium to capacity.
Gin & Tonic
@Randy Khan: But the “growth experience” is attenuated by the big-time/money sports. The participant has essentially no time for anything else. You can manage a normal academic load and a social life and any number of chess/orchestra/debate/sailing. Or you can manage a normal academic load and football, with nothing else. This was very clearly told by a student on a Q&A panel for applicants at an Ivy that my daughter was applying to, when a parent asked that very question. He was honest – he said you can manage the time commitment, to the exclusion of everything else. I suppose one can make that choice, but that’s kind of the opposite of what you want college to be.
dp
Here you go — USA Today did a rundown of all the colleges. Only 7 made a profit on athletics; the rest, including Michigan, were subsidized to a greater or lesser extent by the academic side.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/schools/finances/
At my alma mater, LSU, they regularly turn a profit, to the extent that Bobby Jindal had the Board of Supervisors mandate an annual contribution to the academic side, which is not a bad idea itself, but he used it as an excuse to cut state academic funding.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@FlipYrWhig: It really depends upon the school, the coach, and the sport. To start with, if there isn’t a pro league for the players to go on to, the chances are very high that almost all of the athletes also serious students. I’ve been impressed with the majors of a lot of the women playing hockey at Minnesota, with very few in make work and a bunch in things like math, premed, and chemistry. There are also a bunch in the business school, which impresses some people more than it does me.
Different schools have different policies about how seriously their athletes have to take classes. Harbaugh had a reputation at both Stanford and USD for being pretty demanding. Michigan has fairly strict policies, moreso than most schools with big time athletic programs. They also (particularly before Dave Brandon was AD and quite possibly again now that he’s gone) tend hire coaches that put an emphasis on it. I’m most familiar with the hockey program and have been struck by the number of former players who left school early to go to the NHL who have kept working on their degrees and successfully graduated.
SRW1
Apropos, sport stars (and I know this is the other kind of football): Anybody understand what is going on with the Fernando Torres transfers?
A few days ago it was announced that AC Milan had made his two year loan from Chelsea a full transfer, despite Torres not having played much for Milan and having scored only one goal. Today it was announced that Milan is loaning him out for the next 18 months to his old club Athletico Madrid.
Torres is 30 years old, has been all washed up over the last few years, sad to say, and he would be 32 at the end of the 18 months. Can anybody see what is in these dealings for Silvio Berlusconi’s club?
I can see Chelsea being relieved to have put and end to this £50 million misadventure. If I squint real hard, I can see Athletico hoping to squeeze some more goals out of Torres and possibly recognizing same commercial value in the return of the prodigal son. But what could possibly have been in it for AC Milan?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@dp:
In the case of Michigan, lets put the emphasis on “lesser” shall we? At $255,000 it amounted less than one fifth of one percent of the athletic budget. And even this is a very recent phenomenon, as successive weak football teams dropped those revenues.
Tree With Water
@raven: “If god has given him but little, that little let him enjoy”. The two best sporting times of the year are the MLB and the NFL playoff times. Pig meets mud, at those times, in my case. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Amir Khalid
@gene108:
I’ve seen that clip before. It amazes me every time. Fry notes that it’s a local derby between two Alabama university teams. Yet there’s more going on there than before the UEFA Champions League final, which concludes a tournament among Europe’s top football clubs and is possibly the biggest annual pro sports events on the planet.
dp
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Yes, it’s quite small, but three or four years ago USA Today did the same study and found only LSU and Nebraska turned a profit. And that small number may grow significantly if they’re paying Jim Harbaugh $8,000,000 a year. On the other hand, he may pay for himself (I do expect him to be very successful there).
Ripley
Having worked in a public university for a while now, I can sympathize with this sentiment, but I think the days of intra- and interpersonal expansion as an element of what colleges intend are pretty much over. The business model has won out, in part as a matter of survival as state funding has crumbled with the rightward turn of so many state governments, and in part because of the once-creeping, now leaping zeitgeist of Reaganomics and its pervasive permutations.
The students I serve, undergrad through doctoral, enter college already indoctrinated to this – they want career training with some sense of assurance of post-degree employability; expansion and actualization seem to be either afterthoughts or the focus of bittersweet, nostalgic ramblings of exasperated faculty (guilty as charged).
Besides, when we do offer experiences (other than money-eating, head injurious bullshit like football) and see gains in non-academic qualities and skills like more inclusive and sensitized affiliations and personal expansion, we fuel complaints that we’ve engineered a generation of self-absorbed overgrown children with commie leanings.
The U.S. is so fucking weird.
FlipYrWhig
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Well, that’s good to hear, but, still, it seems to me that if your goal is to become a professional athlete, there’s not really any need for you to do that and go to school _at the same time_. In hockey, don’t most of the Canadian players come up through the junior ranks? Why not just have that here?
Roger Moore
@Tree With Water:
Maybe you should talk about it being a flood of money, since that’s what you’re more likely to get from opening a sluice gate.
Brandon
Lets just assume/accept/stipulate that his salary is paid from funds ring fenced from the rest of the university and that the football program is self-financing. The reason why his salary shocks the conscience is because it is the result of surplus profit through not having to pay the players. It is a plantation style system they are running and the premise of ‘student athletes’ is a farce. If a player gets injured playing for UM and cannot continue to play, they yank their scholarship and give it to someone else leaving the player with a lifetime injury and the prospect of self-financing the rest of their degree if they want to stay in school. It is a system that violates basic workers compensation laws, but it allowed to exist for some premise of ‘amateurism’ that exists only to ensure that ADs and coaches reap the economic benefits. The NCAA system is a massive fraud and the sooner it is abolished the better.
The Other Bob
@Amir Khalid:
What is more important is for the Michigan legislature to pass a bill prohibiting unionization of college athletes.
link
John Revolta
Rousseau needed to stick to jungle beasts and such.
Roger Moore
@charluckles:
Chasing the few big donors is something they do because it makes financial sense. It turns out to be a lot more efficient to woo a few big money donors than to hit up thousands of small money donors; not only do the big donors give more money overall, they also take less total effort. In any case, I think both of those things- the wealth of the few big donors and the abuse of the employees- are symptoms of a broader social disease. It’s too bad that it’s infected even our public institutions like universities, but it by no means starts or stops there.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Brandon:
While this is true at a lot of places, at Michigan as well as most of the Big 10 there is a policy in place that players that lose their athletic scholarship due to injury they are eligible for a scholarship equal to what they were getting as an athlete to finish school.
Tree With Water
@dp: Harbaugh wins. He’s shed of all the extraneous, ugly bullshit that will continue to plague the NFL*, and can relax in a college town doing what he loves to do.
*(where TV’s impact in shaping perceptions is again being felt, only this time unsparingly, and in most cases to the NFL’s continuing detriment).
Svensker
Which do we value more highly: spectator sports or an educated populace? Answer’s obvious. I love me some football but the balance needs to swing back the other way. We have enough Duck Dynasties and Sarah Palins.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@FlipYrWhig: In hockey as well as baseball there are options other than going to college. The Canadian junior leagues are open to Americans as well as Canadians (and Europeans). Having to go to college to move on to professional sports is really only for football and basketball. It isn’t even strictly necessary for the latter but doing so generally involves traveling to Europe and all of the attendant hassles of living and playing somewhere that you don’t speak the local language. (Britain has really crappy pro basketball so it isn’t really an option.) If a hockey player is attending a university, it’s because he wanted to go there, although it’s sometimes debatable whether they really want to go to class.
villageidiocy
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: But is he a federal employee? All of the museum heads are paid by donated dollars, not tax dollars.Perhaps the Secretary is as well?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Tree With Water: You used the words “Harbaugh” and “relax” in the same sentence. One of these words doesn’t mean what you think it does.
FlipYrWhig
@Svensker: False choice, innit? I don’t see anything particularly more wrong about spectator sports than “spectator music,” i.e. live concerts: both are indulgences, diversions, etc. The dilemma for me is the union of spectator sports and education, especially public education. That’s just weird, and relies on a lot of risk-socializing and so forth. I don’t think it’s fun to watch trucks drive over other trucks, but if someone wants to buy a ticket to watch that, bully for them. But if someone says that the only way to become a driver of trucks over other trucks is to get a college scholarship for at least a year of truck-driving, and then the colleges buy the trucks but don’t pay the drivers, something’s gone awry.
shelley
Rousseau, man, you certainly enjoyed painting many, many tiny leaves.
MomSense
@Amir Khalid:
I loved that whole series. He starts in Eastport, Maine and goes out lobstering. He is then invited to eat lobster with a bunch of locals. At some point he looks around the table and realizes he is the only one wearing the tacky, plastic lobster bib and figures out this is our way of marking/mocking the tourists.
I went to a Div III school that didn’t have a good football team. The most popular sports were the club sports. I think a lot of the Div I student athletes are exploited. Of course there are exceptions, but too many end up with long term health problems and a sub-par education. I hope the players unionize so they can deal with improving educational standards and support, long term health care coverage, and their share of the money that is made off their labor.
FlipYrWhig
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: See, this is why my pet solution would be to cordon things off so that sports (even football and basketball) are played at universities by people who also want to do the rest of the stuff associated with universities–pulling all-nighters writing essays, doing your own laundry, playing Ultimate on the quad, etc.–and that people who don’t want to do that stuff can just play football and basketball full-time, year-round, like a job, because it’s their job.
FlipYrWhig
@MomSense:
Agreed. And I think that even if you start off with the best intentions, you probably end up devoting yourself to your team and your sport and having everything else come second, because that’s what your coaches expect you (with some exceptions). Which is why if you want to be a full-time athlete, and you’re good enough, great, do that full-time, and get paid for it, and if it doesn’t pan out, you can try more school instead. That’s how most people balance work and school, vocation and avocation, no?
kwAwk
Beat Ohio State! $8 large is a bargain.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@FlipYrWhig:
Does that mean that arts scholarships — music and theater — should also be yanked since “spectator arts” shouldn’t be funded by the school, either? After all, kids who want to go into acting or music can do that outside of school, so why should everyone else’s tuition money pay for their scholarships?
It seems like kind of a slippery slope to pick and choose which spectator events are supported by the school via scholarships and which ones aren’t. I know that the current big money model is broken, but as others have pointed out, the Div III schools seem to be able to strike a pretty good balance for their scholar-athletes.
villageidiocy
@villageidiocy: also wanted to point out the Obama’s salary is set by law. The Smithsonian functions almost as an independent agency, and because it offers no political power or perks competes against universities and like institutions and not federal agencies for talent. The previous, ridiculously paid Secretary was a bit of a criminal, and politically minded to boot. Clough has been an improvement.
Keith G
@raven: Seconded.
K488
Having spent 30 years teaching at the U of M (music), and with a son attending (a junior, majoring in philosophy), my mind has been reeling for most of that time regarding the size of the numbers involved in the athletics side of the operation. I’m now some 300 miles south of there, at another large state school, but even at that distance this latest from Michigan still leaves me reeling.
Tree With Water
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I’m not so sure. He’s a quirky guy. Could be quirky people relax indulging their quirk(s), which the un-quirklike mistake for tension and general weirdness.
burnspbesq
@richard mayhew:
Northeastern’s experience is an outlier. There is a ton of empirical evidence linking athletic success to alumni fundraising success. Might have been a very different story if Northeastern had dropped hockey, which appears from the outside to be the only sport that the students and alums really care about.
The other thing Tom’s analysis ignores is the possibility of a linkage between athletic success and admissions yield (specifically, does athletic success increase a school’s chances of getting the kids at the top of its admit pool).
Amir Khalid
Off topic, but it seems CNN doesn’t have a monopoly on idiotic theories to explain airplane disasters.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Tree With Water: I think the most that could be said for Jim Harbaugh in that regard is that he finds it less stressful never to relax than he does if he tries. I also think that, as badly as he might want to win a Super Bowl, this is the right move for him. I think his approach works better at the university level where he cycles through players every four years.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@burnspbesq:
Just anecdotally, my mother, who spent three decades working in donor relations for the University of Michigan (for the business school and then the music school) says that it was much easier to raise money after a successful football season than after a bad one.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): I hadn’t thought about it, but, maybe. A friend of mine was in a fairly successful indie band that released multiple albums. He didn’t have a scholarship to study music; he just played music. But, still, I think that’s putting it the other way around. I’m not so concerned about colleges offering scholarships for these things, as an enticement for a student to attend–because that way the student is taking up the attendant responsibility to do these things _and also go to college_. But what if wanting to play a sport is the only reason why you have anything to do with a college in the first place? I feel bad for that kid, because you’re forcing him to go through the motions of being a student just so he can play. Johnny Manziel is a little doucheweasel, and I enjoy watching him fail, but even for someone as unsympathetic as him, it’s kind of absurd-verging-on-pitiable to make him take dubious online college courses just so he has NCAA eligibility. He wants to be a football player, not a student who plays football. Let him do it.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
I honestly think the way to go about this is through a student athlete union which would have a lot more leverage in negotiating player protections and benefits than each player can individually.
I also worry that too many of these student athletes don’t have someone on their side who is capable of successfully advocating for their health, education, etc.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@villageidiocy: Kinda. His employment letter says he has to be able to get a security clearance from the OPM.
My point in bringing him up is that even in the Federal Government there are different pay systems. It’s not really surprising that football coaches are often the highest-paid state employees. Obama’s not the highest paid (quasi?) Federal employee. The head of the TVA may make $7M (total) next year.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who thinks the President is vastly underpaid at $400k a year.)
Villago Delenda Est
@charluckles: In short, it’s the MBAs in charge.
Short term gain is far more important than long term prosperity.
That high-pitched whirring sound you’re hearing? Adam Smith turning over in his grave at near-relativisitic speeds
Villago Delenda Est
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Current President, yes.
Previous President, vastly overpaid.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): Or, to follow up, I think it’s fine for a university to say, “Hey, you’ve got an interesting talent, we’d like to have you be part of our school, and we’ll even cut you a deal on the price.” Then the person goes to that school and does school things, some of which may involve that talent. Cool by me. But I don’t think the sports model is about that. It’s more like, “Hey, you’ve got an interesting talent, and we’d like to have you wear our colors and be on our team, and we’ll try to make the academic side as minimal and undistracting as possible, because we need you to learn the playbook and hit the weight room starting at 4:30 AM every day year-round.” John Calipari has pushed it to the point of absurdity, where he just openly says, “Play for us for a year and then you can launch your NBA career.” There’s no academics entering into it at all. I hear great stories about people like Andrew Luck doing both high-end sports and majoring in serious subjects, so, great, Andrew Luck can go to Stanford if he wants. I’m not sure why Johnny Manziel has to pretend to go to Texas A&M if the academic part is the last reason why he wants to be there. It’s a college. It’s supposed to be academic-with-other-stuff, not the other way around.
Brandon
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: It’s good to know that the Big10 has decided not to be total monsters. The fact that they can still pull scholarships if players are playing up to expectations is still an issue though. It reeks of sweatshop labor exploitation.
rikyrah
Will someone explain to me why Harbaugh is getting $1,000,000 for anything, let alone EIGHT?
explain it to me.
MattF
@Amir Khalid: Dumb, but not quite as dumb as you might think:
http://www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-report/
raven
Liberty Bowl!!!!
gene108
@FlipYrWhig:
College football and men’s basketball’s popularity propelled the formation of professional leagues.
The big time college iteration of those sports predates the pro-leagues by several decades.
Kind of hard to undo that now.
Jado
“… the costs of what are, after all, the core of what a university does. That would be to educate young adults and to create knowledge valuable in both a practical and liberal sense of value. ”
You think THIS is the primary role of a university??
Universities are like corporations – their primary concern is the continuation of their existence, by any means necessary. I sincerely doubt that the board of UM cares about the graduation rate or employment rate except as it reflects on the prestige of the corporation they support. And universities are corporations nowadays. This is what we have made them into.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@rikyrah:
Potential marginal revenue well in excess of $8 million.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
My argument would actually be that professional orchestras don’t treat universities as their de facto farm teams — student musicians may get a closer look because of where they went to school, but they still have to do their time on the “farm team” of touring companies, matinees, etc.
One of the reasons you don’t hear about as many problems with college baseball or hockey is that both of those professional sports still maintain their own minor league systems, and players need to do at least a little time there before they get to the major leagues. The MLB and NHL kinda like having college players because it’s a little more prestigious and they’ll probably be more mature, but it’s certainly not a requirement. I posted a story a couple of days ago about Canadian hockey star PK Subban — he started his professional career playing for a minor league hockey team before he was old enough to graduate high school.
The problem with college football and basketball is that they are now essentially the unpaid minor leagues of the NFL and NBA. Minor league players in MLB and NHL don’t make a lot of money, but they do get paid and have other protections (like a union). College football and basketball players don’t have that.
I think MomSense has the right idea — if these college players are going to be the de facto minor leagues for the NFL and NBA, they need to be compensated and protected like other minor league players are. If not, the NFL and NBA can use their own money to create their own minor leagues and let college players go back to being scholar-athletes, not unpaid professionals.
gene108
@FlipYrWhig:
Intermural sports is a thing at most universities. There are plenty of outlets for students to keep up playing baseball, basketball, softball, etc. with their peers.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
I think the big difference is that college athletics are considered extracurricular while theater and the like are actually part of the curriculum. I would have much less of a problem with college athletics if we treated it as an actual subject. Athletes would still have to meet general education requirements, but they’d have additional classes aimed specifically at athletes that would teach practical parts of being a professional athlete.
Randy Khan
@FlipYrWhig: I’m not entirely sure I would dignify my comment by calling it an argument. It was more in the nature of musing about something that troubles me.
Anyway, outside of football and men’s basketball, I think you’d find that students who play sports mostly are that – students who play sports. When I was in school, as it happens, a good number of athletes were, in fact, economics majors – I’d see them in my classes.
raven
@gene108: Oh I don’t know. If angry bloggers all get together who know, they might tear the system down.
Randy Khan
I apologize for not linking properly to the original comment, but speaking as someone who was deeply involved in a non-sport extracurricular in college, the kind of commitment that was described for sports applies elsewhere, too. I essentially went to no parties (well, a couple a year, but in college that’s the same thing as none) because of what I was doing outside class.
K488
@Jado: Absolutely the case! And UM is very corporate. BTW, it occurred to me that one way of thinking about 8 million dollars is to contemplate the pay rate of adjunct faculty. I knew one adjunct faculty member at UM (terminal degree, excellent teacher) who was pulling in a princely sum of $2000 a course, and teaching two courses a semester. 1 year coaching = 1,000 years piece-work teaching. I know there’s more to the story than this, but the combination of institutions paying what they are paying high profile coaches, and at the same time moving increasingly to adjunct teaching as a way of saving money, gives me pause.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
Interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s actually not a bad solution. Most majors start you off by doing your GEs in the first year or so and then focus you in on your major, which is usually how athletes do it anyway (first year as a freshman/redshirt freshman who doesn’t play, with playing time ramping up as you go). There are skills to being a professional athlete that would be helpful to know (like money management, TV interviewing skills, etc.) so those could be taught as well.
LanceThruster
Fuck professional sports and its mind-numbing effects on society. It is tribalism at its most shallow and vapid expression.
It is the associative principle at its worst. It is why you most often hear, “We’re #1!” or “They suck!” depending on the fortunes of the team.
Go [insert pet fixation with tenuous connection here]!
FlipYrWhig
@gene108: It wouldn’t really be that hard, though. All you’d need is a strong NCAA that mandates a sane balance between sports and academics _and_ an alternative circuit for college-age athletes who don’t care about the academic part, who could get paid. (I know it’s a pipe dream, but I’m not sure enough people realize how screwed up it is to have entangled colleges with competitive athletics like this. They’re not a natural fit. It’s a kludge.)
Roger Moore
@gene108:
I don’t think it necessarily would be that hard. The NBA and NFL would just have to found minor leagues and start stocking them with talent. That would cause some problems for their relationship with NCAA, but the whole point of doing so is that they want to bypass NCAA in the first place.
Cervantes
@LanceThruster: Seconded.
gene108
@Mnemosyne:
It was not until after World War 2 that the NFL consistently attracted better talent than the top colleges.
The College All Star – NFL Champion game was fairly competitive in the first 10-15 years, from 1934 to 1949.
As far as the NFL goes, the fact that there is a substantial difference in the physical maturity of an 18 year old versus a 21 or 22 year old, with regards to what is required to be a professional football player, means the NFL and College football do not have to worry about players completely abandoning college football to play in the pro’s.
Basketball is just a mess. The NBA, (my guess), realizing that grabbing high school kids early in the draft leads fans to think “who’s that kid and why should I care”, made a rule that keeps kids out of the NBA for one year after high school. The NBA gets the benefit of a year of promotion for top prospects, plus college fan bases willing to follow an “alum” into the pro’s, while college basketball is turned into a mess.
MLB and college baseball have, what I think the NBA and college basketball should implement. If you want to go to the pro’s out of high school you can. If you go to college, you commit to playing three years for the school before becoming eligible to go pro.
MLB can still draft tight out high school, while college baseball programs get some stability in their rosters and do not have to worry about their players immediately getting poached by the MLB.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: @Roger Moore: I think you’d have to have it be something like “Sports Studies” and have sport-specific training count towards the major, but it couldn’t be the entirety of your major. You’d need “Sports Ethics” and “Anthropology of Sports” and “Economics of Sports” and that sort of thing, taught by tenure-eligible professors who weren’t exclusively coaches. I don’t think it’s simply “how to be a professional athlete,” because most of those students aren’t going to be professional athletes, even the scholarship-winning ones.
gene108
@Roger Moore:
The NBA is sort of half-assing it with the NBDL, but the NBA’s model does not allow them to send top draft picks to a farm system for two to three years. The NBA has become a league of stars, and fan interest, in a bad team, only gets maintained by hoping your high draft pick becomes the next Lebron James or Kevin Durant.
And who would pay to see these minor league NFL teams play? College football has had a rabid following for over a century. Almost every attempt at a non-NFL pro-league, except the AFL, in the 1960’s, has met with varying levels of failure.
People like college football, because their school is involved, schools close to their school is involved or occasionally you just have some really good teams playing and you want to see who wins.
Minor league baseball and hockey teams fill a niche for those sports in cities that do not have MLB or NHL teams.
The interest is not there to see sub-NFL talent play professional football, in the USA. It has been tried and it has failed repeatedly.
EmDeeAhr
This stuff always gets buried for me, but here are two links directly on point for highly paid Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops:
Bob Stoops gets raise to $5.25 million per year (USA Today):
But $325,000 plus $700,000 signing bonus (I have no idea if that’s prorated over the contract term, front-loaded, back-loaded, or whatever) is still a lot of money for a school. What justifies it?
OU’s $39.9M investment in Bob Stoops yields big return (Tulsa World):
They use this money to fund a lot of Title IX sports, and I mean that: OU actually competes in more women’s sports (10) than men’s sports (9)—no football or wrestling, but adding rowing, soccer, and volleyball, and of course softball replacing baseball. And they’re good at it: several NCAA Women’s Sweet Sixteen or higher appearances in basketball and the 2013 National Championship in softball come to mind.
But yeah, much of it goes back to football, but not the majority of it.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I think it would also be a good idea to include things about alternate careers that take advantage of your sports background, e.g. coaching, front-office work, sportscasting, etc. Most college athletes never make it to the pros, so it would be good for the ones who don’t to have something to fall back on.
trollhattan
TheAn irony here is Michigan is bailing out the Forty Niners, who would be on the hook for Harbaugh’s salary had he gone to another NFL team or home to spend more time with his riding mower. By going to college his contract ends. (At least that’s how it’s been ‘splained to me.)FlipYrWhig
@gene108:
People in the rest of the world care passionately about Queens Park Rangers and A.C. Milan and so forth, without any connection to a school. The college part isn’t why people like it; the football part is, and the college part just gives you the colors and the pageantry, but something else could give you the colors and pageantry; the college is ancillary to the whole thing. It’s just about local tribes beating up on each other. It still would be exciting even if it had nothing to do with the local university. You could still get all worked up about Crimson Tide F.C. vs. Bayou Bengals F.C. because those guys totally suck!
artem1s
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
and he’s going to be the only employee of the football program; the only athletic director, coach, tutor, physical therapist, doctor, groundskeeper, concessionist, cheerleader director, band director, janitor, etc, etc, etc, etc…. oh yea, and professor teaching ‘undecided major’ courses. The problem is the $8M is piling on to a huge infrastructure of salaries that are budgeted under lots of different departments to hide the true cost to the university. And that doesn’t take into consideration all of the cost related to facilities that are ONLY used by the football team and will never, ever be used by or benefit the 99% of the actual students on campus but get maintained with general fund money.
Penn State is a great example of a good school that completely lost it’s sense of perspective regarding football and the impact it has on the college ‘experience’ (drunkenpartyfratboytime). Harbaugh will clean up, retire fat and happy whether he produces or not while the governor is shutting off the water to the citizen’s of Detroit. It’s ludicrous.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@artem1s: Wow. That’s piling together a lot of things that really have nothing to do with each other.
1) What I mentioned wasn’t the total revenue of the football team; it’s the marginal revenue increase that a successful coach could produce relative to what they are currently pulling in.
2) While the football team losing money is a problem in a lot of places, it’s clear that the football team at Michigan makes money; it probably comes close to breaking even just on its direct revenues without counting things like the payments from the Big 10 Network and increased sales of Michigan paraphernalia like hats and jackets. The entire athletic department at Michigan received a grand total of $255,000 from the general fund in 2013 and this was an abnormally high amount historically; Michigan is one of the few places in the country where your concern about the rest of the university funding athletics is misplaced. The football team’s revenue is largely responsible for that.
3) As I explained above there’s another layer of complete irrelevance with regards to your comment about the Detroit bankruptcy: the state of Michigan has almost stopped funding the University of Michigan altogether. The state appropriation is now less than 4% of the revenues of the entire university. The folks in Lansing aren’t even subsidizing the education portion of the university, let alone the athletics.
So, other than being completely wrong in all particulars, your comment was quite insightful.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes, and they care a hell of a lot about the NFL, too. Get down to League 1, though, and interest declines drastically and that’s the more relevant analogy for hypothesized minor league football. Most minor league baseball doesn’t support itself; the affiliated leagues rely on subsidies from major league teams to continue and the independent leagues are entirely small potatoes.
FlipYrWhig
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Economically, the current system for basketball and football is working tremendously well. Fans care, they spend money on tickets and gear and TV, advertisers want in, the whole shebang. From a university perspective, though, it’s pretty rotten, and it’d be nice to foist the whole thing onto the sports-entertainment-industrial complex and have done with it. Between not paying the players and coaches as expensive university employees, often public employees at that, there’s an ick factor that just treating it as professional sports would mitigate immediately.
Tree With Water
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Hell yes it’s the right move. Guys like Belichik and Coughlin must feel like they’re 200 years old within, and it shows. Harbaugh’s got it made.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@FlipYrWhig: I agree that that would be a very elegant solution, albeit one that would likely end most women’s sports at any serious level, but don’t pretend that there would be any significant fan support for the resulting minor league teams. Strip them of their association to the universities to which so many people have allegiance and they’d draw crowds at about the same level that Single A baseball teams do and they would require the same sort of subsidization by the major leagues that Single A baseball does.
CarolDuhart2
Make the athletes of revenue sports employees. Their job is football or basketball-they get paid as such, and would be eligible for all of the usual job protections. Then there would be no conflict over athletics/academics, employees could go pro whenever they get a reasonable offer, take courses over a longer period of time for a major they want and can handle. If a athlete-worker doesn’t work out athletically (injured, whatever) they can either get another job on campus or become a full-time student without penalty. An athlete-worker wouldn’t be so used up and just tossed on the street with no resources either. They could collect unemployment, have those years count towards other employment, get medical care, even transfer payments if the salary is/was low enough.
Warren Terra
We can assume that the budgeting that comes up with the notion so-called “revenue sports” are profitable for the university is almost endlessly manipulable, and likely false; in one example I recall, all revenue from selling items with the university logo on them was credited to the brand identity created by the “revenue sports”, even notepads and binders bought for use in lectures by students indifferent to sports. And then there’s the maintenance and security costs, etcetera, etcetera …
But specifically for Football, there is one huge expense that I can assure you is never included in the accounting: Title IX. Football is unbelievably expensive, and it’s a male-only sport. This generates a massive imbalance in spending on male versus female “student-athletes”, in contravention of Title IX. At the University of Washington a couple of decades ago, this was addressed by spending 10% more on each women’s sport program than on the corresponding men’s sport program, which increase amounted to many millions of dollars but still only went halfway to balancing the spending on Football that benefited only male athletes.
Football programs have only increased in grandiosity and in expense since then – and taking the UW example as a baseline, for every dollar consumed by the Football budget you need to find another fifty cents to throw towards women’s sports programs in order to achieve partial compliance with Title IX. There’s no way in heck any university formally includes this consideration in their claims that Football makes a profit.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Warren Terra:
And with good reason, since the money isn’t being spent on football. Title IX compliance is a lot more complicated than that and you are simply incorrect if you think that the approach Washington takes is what all schools do. There are many ways to achieve compliance.
To some extent, the accounting procedures you are advocating would require the entire athletic budget be charged to the football and basketball teams as at many schools it’s questionable whether they would be offering other sports if the NCAA didn’t mandate that they have 18 different teams to be eligible for Division I membership.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@CarolDuhart2:
I come down in favor of this but it does have problems of its own. The most obvious is that it would likely end up devastating a lot of women’s sports. One consequence of the athletes becoming employees (for reasons I’ll explain if you want) is that they would most likely no longer be considered in Title IX calculations. Schools would no longer be required to balance the opportunities offered to male football and basketball players with opportunities for female athletes. So the number of women’s sports needed to balance those for men would be reduced greatly. A lot of cash strapped athletic departments would probably leap at the opportunity to cut those expenses.
FlipYrWhig
@CarolDuhart2: That’s not bad. Basically treat athletes like librarians and other administrators, and coaches like executive VPs and such… That way they’re representing the institution and helping it earn prestige, the way athletics works in the best cases now, but they’re doing so without the often-forced student-athlete framework. I can see someone wanting to make a career of playing football “at the college level” without being college _students_ and without any notion of trying to make the leap to the NFL. Interesting…
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@FlipYrWhig: A model of making them athletes without requiring that they be students has some rather odd consequences that might make it unfeasible. This would put the positions outside the category of being student jobs. At a lot of schools that would make it impossible to enforce age or length of employment restrictions which would mean that your dream of making it effectively the minor leagues for the NFL unworkable, because the sort of players that a college team would want to employ in order to win now would be very different from the selection of players that the NFL would view as the best prospects. Maybe that would force the NFL to develop its own minor league system.
Another consequence of paying the players anything close to fair market value would be an extreme stratification in pay between the top and the rest. It’s unlikely that, in any such system, the vast majority of NCAA football players would be worth anything close to a full scholarship to their school. Even at the power schools, of which their would be even fewer than there are now, a lot of those on the current rosters would be gone. I leave up to you whether you consider that to be a good or a bad thing, but it would definitely be a thing.
FlipYrWhig
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I’m trying to take a very narrow view of what relationship colleges (i.e., higher education) and athletics should have. It feels legitimate if colleges were to have paid ringers who represent them somehow. It also feels legitimate if colleges were to have students who play some football as an extracurricular activity while they pursue something academic–and then football-playing non-students could just be semi-pros with better infrastructure (because I would guess that a lot of football players currently affiliated with colleges would rather not bother with the whole academic part; they want to compete against the best and get famous, and school is a distraction). But unpaid athletes who’d rather not be at school taking midterms and such… that seems like the worst possible structure for them _and_ ethically dubious for the college they nominally represent. (I know there’s no chance for what I’m talking about to happen, but mostly I want to call attention to the fact that the way we answer these questions in the USA is surpassingly strange, and yet we’re all totally acclimated to it like it’s second nature: get recruited out of high school, play in college until you’re good enough to leave, then turn pro. That middle step is weird and supports billions of dollars of happy spending. SMH.)
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@FlipYrWhig: My ideal world solution would be for the NBA and the NFL to set up legitimate minor leagues and support them. Eventually you’d end up with college football and basketball being more like college baseball and hockey, though it would be gradual and probably wouldn’t go all the way. For a time, at least, the inertia would keep most of the 18-year old players going to college to play.
A part of the reason I don’t want to see university football and basketball teams completely divorced from the student-athlete concept is, as I said above, that it would see serious women’s athletics severely curtailed if not obliterated in most sports. The same would be true of minor men’s sports at the college level as well but there are a lot more of them that have a significant professional existence than there are for women. Women’s team sports would end up being just basketball as long as the NBA continues to subsidize the WNBA.
You are correct that the structure of college sports in America is very unusual relative to the rest of the world, although not quite unique; Canada has a similar though less extensive version in the CIS. That’s related to why the U.S. and Canada are the only places that have a vibrant women’s team sports environment. To the extent that other countries have successful teams it’s largely because their top players either do or have played in the NCAA. Women’s ice hockey is a wasteland outside of North America and basketball isn’t much better.
Until interest in women’s sports can sustain actual professional leagues, it’s pretty much the NCAA or nothing.
FlipYrWhig
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: Sounds reasonable.
Goblue72
Deal is $5MM per year plus incentives. He won’t even be highest paid coach in the Big Ten, let alone college football.
Randy Khan
@Goblue72: Actually, $7 million this year ($5 million plus a $2 million signing bonus), $5 million next year and the year after, $5.5 million in years 4 and 5, a bit more than $6 million in years 6 and 7, plus incentives and an undefined “deferred compensation” arrangement to be determined at the end of next season. Or so says the Detroit Free Press.
Still, not $8 million a year, at least not yet, and it makes the incremental economic benefit of hiring him look even better than had been discussed upthread.