Mike Fish has written a fascinating piece for ESPN.com that explores the money rolling in to big time college football programs, mainly through the lens of the SEC. We’ve all heard or surmised some of the stuff, but it’s the way he rolls in factoid after factoid about the dollars that becomes almost riveting. Consider these points:
- SEC faithful filled campus stadiums to 98 percent of capacity this fall, the 12th consecutive season the conference topped the country in football attendance. This season, for the first time ever, every game — conference and nonconference alike — involving an SEC team was televised. SEC teams even drew a total of 450,000 fans to their spring games in 2009 — a remarkable average of better than 37,000. That’s more than up-and-comers Boise State and Cincinnati attracted per regular-season game in 2008.
- For a coach, the SEC can hardly be called a steppingstone to the NFL, as many college jobs are. In fact, five of the SEC’s 12 current head coaches came to the conference from head-coaching jobs in the NFL…
- The rewards, though, are definitely worth the risk, especially when the average salary for an SEC coach pushes $3 million a season. And there’s almost always a buyout clause to lessen the pain if things go wrong. Mark Richt (Georgia), Gene Chizik (Auburn), Petrino (Arkansas) and Spurrier (South Carolina) each would cash close to a $2 million check if they were fired tomorrow. Les Miles, according to a 2008 contract tweak, is due $18.75 million if LSU decides to part company with him.
- Tennessee was so hot to rid itself of Phillip Fulmer after a 5-7 record in 2008 that it paid a $6 million buyout. This came a year after a 10-win season for which Fulmer had received a contract extension. Then, UT hustled to sign a deal with his successor, guaranteeing Kiffin $14.25 million through the 2014 season. Kiffin will be due $7.5 million if he is fired without cause.
- According to federal documents filed last year, the Florida association reported almost $105 million in total revenue. That’s more than the Big East Conference’s reported revenue; more even than the combined total of Conference USA, the Mid-American Conference, the Mountain West Conference and the Western Athletic Conference. It paid $24 million in salaries compared with $17.3 million to cover scholarships for 440 University of Florida athletes.
- In fact, two non-SEC powers — Texas ($87.6 million) and Ohio State ($68.2 million) — generated the most football revenue last season, according to survey data that schools are required to file with the federal government. But the SEC is home to six of the top 10 moneymakers in the college game: Florida ($66.2 million), Georgia ($65.2 million), Alabama ($64.6 million), LSU ($61.9 million), Auburn ($58.6 million) and South Carolina ($57.1 million).
Whew. And there’s plenty more besides that.
Fish compares the SEC to the New York Yankees. It’s a valid comparison, one I’ve made as well:
… On the other hand, spending wads of cash to hire assistants makes perfect sense from the head coach’s standpoint. It’s the southern-fried football version of George Steinbrenner’s method of running a sports operation. Relatively speaking, you’ve got more money than you know what to do with. Unlike George, you can’t spend the moolah on the players, so you spend it on the next closest thing.
It’s totally logical. When you’ve got a hard salary cap (and the 85-player limit on scholarships is about as hard as you can get) and tons of money rolling in, there are only a few places where you can spend in hopes of winning – coaching salaries and facility upgrades are the most obvious. Just ask Jimmy Sexton.
“I’m the dumbest person in the world for making this statement, because when I go to the Big Ten or ACC to do business, they’re going to remind me of this,” says Memphis-based agent Jimmy Sexton, who represents four current SEC coaches. “But the SEC just has a lot more money available. They have larger stadiums. They have more advanced giving programs from their alumni base for tickets. They obviously have a better television package [new 15-year deals totaling more than $3 billion with ESPN and CBS]. The job that [SEC commissioner] Mike Slive and those guys have done is extraordinary if you think about it. We’re in the greatest downturn in our economy since the Great Depression, and they’re setting records.
“Now, not every school that is paying their coach a lot of money is in the SEC. I mean, you got Southern Cal, Iowa, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas. There are plenty of examples of schools that pay SEC-type money, but [the SEC] is clearly where the money is.”
And of course no article like this would be complete without a denial of reality from the land of academia.
“Well, it is a very sad commentary on where we have gotten to with these salaries,” says Knight Commission co-chairman William “Brit” Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland system. “And it raises very legitimate questions about the value system we’re operating under. … I think we need to find what I would call a more rational and responsible fiscal model. I do feel that the present economic circumstances and the almost certainty of a very slow recovery, especially in higher education in terms of resources, sets the stage for the beginning of some meaningful reforms in the financing of intercollegiate athletics.”
Translation: it’s time for the haves to start forking over some serious bucks to the have-nots. Never mind what that bad old market place has to say about things, those presidents and chancellors have some real value! (Fish rather deliciously points out that a recent Chronicle of Higher Education report revealed that a record 23 college presidents are being paid in excess of $1 million.)
And that goes for the schools trying to keep up with the Joneses of the college athletic world, too.
“After you get to No. 25, they are all losing money, but none of them want to feel like they are not going to be competitive,” Kirwan says. “So they are trying to hire coaches in competition with the big schools and provide the facilities that will make recruiting competitive for them. It is just a vicious cycle.”
If these guys could repeal the laws of supply and demand, they’d do it in a heartbeat. That’s what Congress is for.
My favorite quote comes from the head of a search firm, who tries to sum up the issue here by asking a rhetorical question that both sides already have their answers to.
“I don’t set the market [for salaries],” says Carr, a former Florida All-American and NFL player. “I’m just saying that in an academic enterprise, I think the salaries are disproportional to the value that is added. Now it may not be disproportional to the revenue generated, OK. But that is not the question. The question is, is it justifiable to pay somebody multiples of millions of dollars to coach a sport?” [Emphasis added.]
That’s basically incoherent when you think about it. What the academics and the schools that aren’t generating top dollars are really asking is “can you come up with a structure that helps us stop doing what we can’t stop doing on our own?” And the rhetorical question that Carr should be asking is “why should we?”
Get The Picture 
Here’s what faculty make compared to presidents and coaches, in case anyone is interested:
http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/
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Off-topic, but from rbubp’s link: I’m disappointed to see there still are significant discrepancies between male and female professors’ salaries; I’m stunned that, among the big four universities in the state (Emory, GT, GSU, UGA) that discrepancy appears to be greatest at Emory.
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Yup.
It’s a very sad fact.
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I would be interested to see the disciplines for each of the sexes. If more women teach sociology and more men teach physics, and physics professors earn more than sociology professors, then you have discrimination which is appropriate.
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After reading this article, it would be an absolute shame if we don’t open up the coffers for a top-shelf defensive staff. Top-10 revenue generator, and our special teams are worse than Toledo’s.
Not a great example of resource utilization Damon…
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In what way was anything that happened recently on the coaching staff Damon’s fault? Richt made all the (bad) decisions about who was coaching what, where…
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People always have a corn cob up their asses about executive compensation. Look at Wall Street. There is a general backlash against anyone who is at the top of the ladder — in the corporate ranks or the coaching ranks — especially those that make “obscene” amounts of money for doing what most incorrectly believe is little to no work. Forget the immense pressure they are under to produce what the customer wants (wins, profits, etc.). Forget the constant media hounding. Forget the constant second-guessing. Forget the 80-hour work weeks.
If you are the best at what you do (or even if you are not), you deserve to be as well compensated as anyone is willing to pay you. It’s called capitalism. If they artificially capped salaries to compare to what a professor may make (who, by the way, may work a quarter of the time a head coach or coordinator works per week with one-thousandth of the pressure or media scorn), then coaching would not be worth the trouble and effort and the good ones would leave the profession or go to the NFL (it’s all about the same to me), and the money train would screech to a halt.
It is sad that “academics” are too self-important to believe the law of supply and demand doesn’t apply to them.
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This country has had an unhealthy worship of Academics and academics for a couple of generations.
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Listen, I don’t want to defend the complaints by the academics in question–really I don’t– but part of the issue is the timing. The budget crisis has affected universities pretty profoundly, and we’re talking about two mil raises at a time when faculty are being let go and departments dissolved.
But I personally am fully aware of where this money cam from and Mr. Brwon’s department’s value to the university….plus how quickly he’d be gone if he didn’t produce.
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Sorry for my decidedly unacademic lack of editing.
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The timing for academics is bad, but athletics is generating record revenues despite the economy. There’s no reason, other than envy, not to reward the coaches who are responsible.
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This is a ridiculous assertion. “Academics” (a coded bad word among many, for some reason, who seem to think learning is bad?) have all the right in the world to be mad about the state of pay in college football. In a perfect world, yes, coaches would get paid what they are, but the focus of the institution(s) would not also be lost behind an unflinching desire to win. Minor league baseball teams can spend all the money they want on coaches and facilities because they’re unabashedly a business, but college athletics are supposed to be about college first, athletics second.
Now, I’m not naive enough to believe that school will ever come first for 95% of the people involved, but it’s obvious where we as a society have put our misplaced values when the people who spend their lives educating to better society are paid a fraction of the salaries that purely recreational coaches are. I grant you that Richt is under more scrutiny than any professor in the Economics department, but to some extent we need to recognize that when we pay $5mil a year to Brown at UT and the university itself has to cut positions and underpay graduate assistants who teach courses, we’re costing ourselves int he long run. People complain about the poor quality of education, and its because there is no incentive to get or keep the actual, good teachers. People who truly care about teaching have no reason to do so at ANY level of the American education system, with teachers at K12 levels being paid no where near their actual value to society.
The problem we have is that people don’t recognize anything but the problems with teaching. Yes, there are plenty of bad teachers (and coaches!), but at some point the only way you make something get better is not by continuously taking money OUT of the system (see: Regents, Georgia), but by committing to funding and rewarding GOOD teachers. As rbubp states, the issue in this case is mainly one of bad timing, as well. If the university was not consistently underpaying and cutting jobs for teachers by constantly telling them that they must sacrifice and take less, while at the same time throwing money at the (and yes, I realize the Athletic Association is a separate entity that gives money to the university) coaches, this wouldn’t be as large an issue. It’s just immensely frustrating to look at your salary and the resources you have available to you for your work, and then see the crazy amount of money thrown at a recreational pass time.
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The problems with teacher salaries are due to the teachers themselves. Educators have set up salary systems which provide perverse incentives for teachers in this country. Bad teachers get paid pretty much the same as good teachers. And those teachers certainly don’t want to compete against other schools for private tuition dollars when tax dollars are so much easier to get.
As for your point on priorities, let’s look at some numbers.
The FY2009 budget for UGA is $1,310,874,438. The UGA Athletic Association’s budget is $76,278,280. So the people of Georgia are spending less than 6% of their academic budget for UGA on athletics.
Cry me a river.
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I understand your point about percentages, but you have to recognize that the primary responsibility of the University is to teach students. Regardless of how little or much the football program makes, the goal of UGA is to provide an education for the rising Georgia students. When we can’t do that due to massive budget cuts that cost us in classroom positions (my department alone is relying more and more on graduate students as cheap labor for teaching, which is criminal really when you think about the quality of education given to students), we’re failing at that mission. And, when the teachers see complaints from the administration about budget numbers, and (in Texas’ case) a huge raise for the head coach, there is a bit of cognitive dissonance there.
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There is no cognitive dissonance. The money for academics is from pot A, which is dwindling. The money for athletics is from pot B, which is overflowing and even leaking into pot A ($2 million per year in UGA’s case).
I see nothing to be gained in pot A (and indeed the loss of $2 million per year) if we agree to abolish pot B.
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It’s interesting that you didn’t include the number of employees in that comparison, Hackerdog.
Please, too…”the problems with teacher salaries are due to teachers themselves..
Educators have set up salary systems which provide perverse incentives for teachers in this country”? Are you referring to secondary schools? This is not how it works in academia.
As a tenured professor in a state university 1000 miles from Athens, I have never heard of a “salary system” or any “incentives” other than creating peer-reviewed research that contributes to the field in meaningful (and measurable) ways. Good teaching, moreover, is absolutely measured, observed, and rewarded, and bad teaching is noted and monitored and will, if not improved, result in dismissal.
I don’t even get a cost of living increase–it’s all based on MERIT. What is this system you speak of?
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Amen. I make less than people on unemployment currently. I’ve checked! (Granted, I’m a graduate assistant, so we’re basically slave labor for the school to get free classes taught without paying real professors)
No benefits, either.
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The number of employees isn’t particularly meaningful. Money spent is a better measure.
And the perverse incentives I was speaking of are primarily in the K-12 schools, where merit-based pay typically isn’t even allowed. But tenure in colleges and universities can also diminish proper incentives.
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As an ex-associate professor at a big state Health Sciences Center, I can tell you from personal experience that fully a third of the academic faculty at most institutions are vastly OVERPAID based on the amount of meaningful work and on the teaching they do.. The first thing that could be done to improve academics is to eliminate tenure and get rid of a lot of dead weight.
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Now I do have to defend this. Since you have knowledge of the field, especially in something like Health Sciences, you understand why tenure exists, right? You may be familiar with politically-sensitive research?
The best universities have mandatory five-year reviews for tenured faculty. Should be everywhere, I know, but I also know that in my department most of us work 60-70 hours a week during the school year even without the mandatory five-year review I personally have been pushing for.
Is that enough productivity for you?
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You’re both right, in many ways. Tenure is not accomplishing the goal it was originally designed to do, and causes laziness amongst the oldest and most entrenched professors, no question. In many cases, its akin to a much, much less well paid “golden parachute” that caused so much uproar after the bottom fell out of the stock market.
However, its stated purpose is a noble one, and there must be a rational way to reform the policy so that it still accomplishes its goal without creating a sense of laxness in entrenched professors.
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“I think the salaries are disproportional to the value that is added. Now it may not be disproportional to the revenue generated.”
What’s the difference between revenue generated and value added?
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I think that depends on who’s doing the asking.
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Yeah I know. I suppose I could give the guy a break because the comment is sloppy and probably hurried, but he contradicts himself all over the place.
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“ ‘I think the salaries are disproportional to the value that is added. Now it may not be disproportional to the revenue generated.’
What’s the difference between revenue generated and value added?”
A lot, if the revenue generated is being used to self-fund an internal department that does not fit, and in many ways contradicts, the institution’s mission.
Which it (the revenue) mostly is (though definitely not all: http://uga.edu/gm/ee/index.php?/single/2009/05/395/ ).
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Before I’d give credence to that argument, I’d have to see decent data proving that the proverbial biology lab goes without microscopes so the football team can have extra jockstraps.
My feeling is that the value added by the pricey football coach is the same as the revenue generated. I thought Mr. Carr up there was just making a sloppy comment.
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How about using outdated, barely operable microscopes or computer equipment while the FB coach gets a $2 mil raise? Or having a building without proper ventilation for airborne chemicals?
That’s the issue. It goes on, and on, and on. But people don’t donate for that stuff. It falls to the state, and that all gets rationed.
You think this is anecdotal, and as it pertains to UGA it is, but some of those examples exist in my D1 school’s department right now, and have existed for years. The AD is thriving, however, so perhaps we’ll get some runoff eventually.
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I think it might be worth clarifying that universities are funded by hundreds of little piles of money (of varying sizes, of course) that cannot be shuttled back and forth between each other. So when I refer to the AD as “self-funding,” that is largely true by definition. But the idea that one area contributes to another area, or sacrifices for something else, is really NOT true…it’s like ships passing in the night, unless one ship decides to donate some resources to the other–completely voluntarily.
Some ships are aircraft carriers and others are pontoons.
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Holy moly, really?
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Les Miles owes his agent a HUGE fruit basket.
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LSU beats Notre Dame’s buyout of Charlie the Big Tuna by 0.75 million dollars. Because that breaks a record previously thought by most on the planet to be unbreakable, The Hat owes his agent two Claxton fruitcakes in addition to the one fruitbasket.
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Fruitcake has been around, and reviled, for hundreds of years. In the early New Jersey campagin of the Revolutionary War, an artillery officer complained to General Washington that his men had no shells. Washington’s reply: ‘but you have fruitcake don’t you’
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Those are fighting words at the Claxton munitions plant where they manufacture fruitcakes. Why can’t we all get along and enjoy fruitcakes like they do in the P.I. where there’s a little fruitcake in everybody?
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Shout out from Claxton! And by the way, even people here hate fruitcake.
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They call that a TWEAK!?
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Seems like Sexton is lumping the BigTen with the ACC a bit unjustly. Other than NU, the BigTen has just as large, if not larger stadiums at most schools. Alumni giving plans aren’t doing that poorly either.
Just seemed like an odd statement.
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Here’s a link to a listing of the Big10 football stadium sizes…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Ten_Conference#Conference_facilities
fwiw, they look more professional in the basketball arena size than anything else; if I recall correctly, Illinois reduced their stadium capacity recently?
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That (wikipedia numbers with standard caveat that it is indeed wikipedia) still has this average football capacity comparison:
SEC 77,400
BigTen 75,525
ACC 59,262
I wouldn’t call the BigTen stadiums small; they have the largest 3 stadiums and just 2 thousand less of an average. That’s all I was saying.
And Illinois did lose between 6-7k seats not too long ago when they upgraded the stadium. Technically, Minnesota lost a few thousand seats moving to the new stadium, but that has the ability to add another tier and 30k more seats, which would had happened if the city of Minneapolis would have forced the Vikings onto campus. Michigan is also down about 2k seats during their construction phase, but should be back up to highest capacity by the end of next season.
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ESPN.com, aspiring to show that its chops are as worthy as a National Enquirer investigative reporter’s, blows cover on sensitive ongoing covert negotiations among Goldman Sachs, the owner of the country; Michael Slive, Commissar of The SEC; and Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chair to have the U.S. Bullion Depository, Ft. Knox, KY merged into The SEC which is shown relaxing in the background of this file photo. Other conferences shown in foreground.
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I don’t have a problem with people making money in college football.
But I get annoyed with people using terms like “free market” as applied to college football. Its not a free market.
The BCS is arguably the biggest cartel in sports.
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Other than that it’s not a cartel, as that’s defined under antitrust law, and that it’s smaller in scope than the NCAA basketball tournament and in revenue compared to the NFL, that’s pretty spot on. 😉
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It’s an opt-in monopoly where opposition is really unthinkable. What are the non-AQ conferences supposed to do, take a principled stand for a year or two and lose and revenue collecting ability? That’s like “asking” someone to rob a bank for you while you’ve got their wife and kids under surveillance. The non-AQ teams have no choice but to “opt” into a corrupt system that leaves them on the level of the “have nots” while being able to say they made the choice.
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An “opt-in monopoly”? I’m not sure what that is exactly.
There’s nothing stopping schools from breaking off from the existing order and creating their own postseason in competition with the BCS conferences. Indeed, isn’t that what some of you argue for when you urge some nameless entity to start up a playoff without the full participation of the Big Six?
There’s also nothing stopping any other group from starting up a league that pays 18-year olds to play and skip the entire SA thing.
The NCAA bought the freakin’ NIT to eliminate a source of competition, for God’s sake. That’s about as blatant a cartel-like move as you’ll see. Yet it’s always funny to hear people raise up the NCAA as some sort of savior for fair competition.
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I hate to repeat myself (from the other day) but as to the NCAA why do we really need the bastards, anyway?
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The BCS is just the tip of the FBS iceberg, which dwarfs college b-ball. And correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the congressional critics of the BCS citing anti-trust laws as well?
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Some have urged the Justice Dept. to act. Antitrust is an executive (enforcement) function, not legislative. I think it speaks pretty loudly that no one has filed anything.
The one successful antitrust claim filed civilly in the realm of college football was over TV rights. Georgia and Oklahoma sued and beat the NCAA. Again, if there were something to this as it pertains to the BCS, I can’t help but feel that we’d have heard from the Mountain West before now in the courts.
Not sure what you mean by your “FBS iceberg” reference. There are currently 120 D-1 football teams. There are over 300 schools eligible for March Madness.
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As far as the Academics arguing about coach’s pay remember what some wise sports guy once said. “As soon as an English professor can fill a 90,000 seat stadium at $50 a head to hear his lecture then they can bitch”.
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How much revenue is generated by an English professor producing 1000 credit hours a semester at $500/credit hour (public school rate)?
Let’s see…$500,000 per semester, or $1 mil per year. I know that’s not as much as the model suggested, but is it surprising that it’s that close? Let’s also see…one football coach versus how many English profs producing those numbers? 10? 15?
More accurate comparison of “gate receipts”:
Ten English profs=$10,000,000.
One coach with seven home games=$31, 500,000.
Typical coach salary, well, we know that. Typical English prof salary…
Now, if the English profs could only get TV contracts for those lectures, they could really compete.
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I think it’s unfair that English teachers have so many different ways to make money. As an example, for those English teachers who wonder whether induction into hot English is like induction into hot wax, here are some tips. Just keep your eyes focused on the twinkling cross when not repeatedly and for no apparent reason blocked by the bothersome TPM timesheet reports…you are not getting sleepy…you are wondering what the rest of her looks like…you are wondering why she wears no engagement or wedding ring but only rings on her middle fingers…is that a bad sign…or does that mean she is available and, if so, you guess that her story is so complicated, would she even bother to give you the time of day…you guess probably not unless you made as much as a Mack Brown or a Nick Saban or at least until you learn how to properly fill out a TPM timesheet report…you wonder why she looks some whut like the Bama chick in the Mama Named Him That Julio Jones white rap video except that this one’s got hot librarian glasses and an English accent rather than an Alabama accent…
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People are paid based on their value to society. Society just doesnt value the work that teachers do. And quite frankly the work they do doesnt require a ton of skill, hence the low value. Hitting a baseball or coaching a football team are skills that have proven to be very very rare at the highest levels, which explains exactly why they get paid so much. UGA is creating thousands of new teachers each year. Just think of teachers as commodities like milk or sugar…certainly life would be different without them, but I am not paying $20/pound for dixie crystals…now that high grade raw sugar from Hawaii will get a couple of extra bucks, just like the good teach with the masters or who teaches the AP classes.
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If we, as a state, valued baseball more than education, I think we would spend as much, or more money on baseball than we do on education.
The GA DOE reports that the total expenditures in 2009 for all K-12 public school districts in GA total $14,265,134,444. ESPN reports that the payroll for the Atlanta Braves was $94,313,666. So the salaries for all the MLB players in Georgia is less than 0.7% of the money we spend on public K-12 education. Maybe those baseball players are underpaid?
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So now you’re comparing payroll alone to entire budgets…again without even sniffing the number of employees involved, much less other fairly expensive factors such as construction and maintenance. How much of that was spent
I don’t even know where to begin, other than that throwing out numbers like that without a hint of context is foggy, at best.
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sorry…How much of the Ga D. Ed. was spent on electricity, I meant to propose…
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You probably dont really want to know the answer to that question. But if you want to do the reasearch you can at http://www.open.georgia.gov/
but what you will find is that nearly 90% of all school budgets are for salaries and benefits. The other 10% is EVERYTHING else…power, construction, gas, books, desks, footballs…everything. So yeah comparing the payroll of the braves to the education budget is probably spot on.
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http://dunwoodynorth.blogspot.com/2009/02/dekalb-county-school-board-should.html
if you are interested in a little more in depth look at educational spending in the dekalb area.
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Fair enough.
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And to Hackerdog’s original point, no, we do not value sports more than education, in any measurable way, really. (Well, except maybe in Texas.)
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DawgPhan reread what you just wrote above. Actually we as a society have gotten things backwards. Teachers are actually among the most important people in our society. They train the next generation. They teach children right from wrong. Others in our society that perform tasks that are vital but not highly compensated are police (who risk their lives daily keeping the 1% who are the bad guys from killing, robbing, raping, etc. the other 99% of us), firefighters/rescue workers ( who save lives of people in emergency situations daily), EMT’s, and our military. Every one of those vocations listed above are far more important than putting a basketball through a hoop or catching a football. I am a capitalist myself. I believe in capitalism with all my heart and soul. But, even I have to admit that there are times it produces results that are not right.
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Save me the bleeding heart…teachers in GA make more than enough money…police officers make more than enough money…if they dont like it, then get another job. If you like being a cop or a teacher, then tell yourself that money isnt everything.
There are lots of people wanting to and becoming teachers. That means that we will pay very little for someone to teach. Simple.
There are very few people who can coach big time college football, so we pay them a lot to do it.
I work in the non-profit world, my wife is in the academic world. I know about not making lots of money, but we are happy with the work we do and the money we get.
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Wow, it’s like reading Ayn Rand on a football blog. Not that I would ever want to read any more of her books, ever again. Dagny can blow me, and Galt is a total tool bag.
*shudder*
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I do not believe what DawgPhan says about teachers and other persons performing jobs vital to our society really has as much to do with supply and demand as it has to do with choices we as a society have made. Somehow we decided that entertainment is more important than anything else–a concept which can only be described as f#cked up. So the guy who teaches kids how to block and tackle (albeit at the highest level) gets $5 Million but the guy who runs into a burning building to save the life of someone he doesn’t even know gets $30K. By the way, it takes a lot more skill (and guts) to do the latter than it does to do the former. If people exist on this planet 1000 years from now (a dubious premise) they will undoubtedly look back on our “civilization” with the same kind of skepticism that we now view the Incas, Mayans and other peoples we now consider primitive and backward. And they will be right.
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To illustrate your erroneous thinking, see my above post on the totals we spend as a state on education versus athletics. We spend $14.2 billion on K-12 education in this country. We spend maybe $6 million on the coaching salaries of FBS schools in this state?
You’re saying that the ratio of $6 million to $14.2 billion is too large? What kind of a ratio would be acceptable to you?
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Exactly what part of my thinking was erroneous? That we have a “civilization” or that it takes guts to run into a burning building to save somebody?
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Speaking of cops, how much guts does it take to shoot an elderly woman 30 or so times in her own home, only to then plant drugs in her basement to cover it up while she lies bleeding in her living room? Are those the cops that we aren’t paying enough..the lying, cheating, stealing, incompetent assholes that are happier setting speed traps, forging warrants, and killing civilians..those cops?
Save me the burning building and teaching the future BS.
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The part where the ratio of paying football coaches ($6 million or so) to fire/police (however many BILLION) is too large for your tastes.
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“2 million $ indoor practice field for the xxU baseball team and the xxx buildings still leak when it rains. fan-f****ing-tastic.”
Facebook post from a student mine a few hours ago, fwiw.
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Who is the fifth HC to come from the NFL? I only see Kiffin, Spurrier, Saban and Petrino.
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Rich Brooks.
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That might be technically true I guess. But Brooks also sat out three years doing nothing and was not hired as “the head coach” in his last NFL job. Just an interim thing.
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FWIW, Brooks was the head coach of the St. Louis Rams in 95-96. I would say his NFL experience stacks up well against the other four SEC coaches with NFL HC experience.
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Well, except for Kiffin, his college experience before taking his current job doesn’t stack up.
And of the five coaches, he’d be the last one thought of as a hot hire when he was hired.
just saying
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You have to give it to CRB, though. He has done a good job at UK. They now have had 4 winning seasons in a row and are going to 4 bowls in a row, something unheard of at UK. Plus, he resurrected the program at Oregon. I understand they renamed their stadium (or field) after him. The guy can coach. Sooner or later UK is going to have a breakthrough year. UK scares me a lot more than South Carolina does.
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