Woody: College presidents hold key to salary problem: Pay less
Many talk about reforming college athletics, but for the past 20 years, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics is one of the few organizations that actually PAUL
WOODY
tries to do something.
The Knight Commission conducted a survey of Football Bowl Subdivision school presidents. They preside over colleges formerly known as Division I-A -- the power conferences.
Of the 119 presidents, 80 percent responded to the survey. The results are startling.
Eighty-six percent of the presidents said their football coaches are overpaid, 87 percent said their men's basketball coaches are overpaid and most said they don't know what to do about it.
The presidents see this as a major problem in financing athletic programs. Yet, we are left with the image of college presidents wringing their hands in anxiety as they mutter, "What to do?"
The first thing to do is take control of the athletic department. That means having a major voice in coaches' compensation, ignoring the market forces, limiting outside income and telling college trustees their support is essential.
Without the trustees' backing, college presidents have little chance for success. Loud, wealthy alumni with an overblown sense of self-worth can get college presidents and athletic directors fired.
Coaching salaries have lost all sense of proportion. Multiple coaches in football and basketball make millions of dollars per year.
We tend to write these things off as "the price of doing business."
These men coach football and basketball. They aren't finding cures for cancer or solving world hunger.
Their paychecks are out of line with their contributions.
College presidents are right to be concerned. They are wrong to feel powerless to solve the problem.
Here's a simple solution. The next time a major college job opens, the president must tell the athletic director the new coach's salary will be lucrative, but reasonable, in the $500,000-to-$700,000 range.
Oh, the horror. How could those schools find an adequate coach for so little?
There are hundreds of excellent coaches, assistants included, who would be thrilled to coach in the ACC, SEC, Big Ten or Big 12 for much less money than what coaches in those conferences currently earn.
The only way to reduce coaching costs is for one school to have the courage to hold its ground when hiring its next coach.
College presidents, athletic directors and fans worry about losing their "low paid" coach to a school with deeper pockets. That always will happen.
But a reverse domino effect also will take place. If one major college holds the line on coaching salaries, another will follow and then another.
This is a far better step toward cost-containment than cutting scholarships, support staff or eliminating swimming or wrestling programs.
This isn't nonsense. It's common sense. It will work.
Someone has to lead. But college presidents have shown they are better at hand-wringing than having the courage to go first.
Helping college presidents overcome that should be the next goal of the Knight Commission.
Contact Paul Woody at (804) 649-6444 or
. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/World_of_Woody.
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The comments on this subject are not what I would want my children to see. Imagine if children acted this way after a blow-out score on the soccer field. I would be horrified.
No need to fret. The kids won’t act out…leave that to the parents. We’ve certainly seen enough of that in visual media.
We live in America and have a right to voice our opinion by voting.
Similar principle applies to freedom of speech. Self-appointed censors need not muck up that one vestige of freedom in this nation where “freedom” is gradually fading from the public consciousness, save the efforts of a select few.
Their paychecks are out of line with their contributions.
Was this line written by Chairman Mao, Obama’s “Pay Czar”, or a sports columnist talking about an American citizen receiving his due compensation from a legal contract? Americans used to be able to wrap their minds around the simple concept that the market will determine what people are worth. The fact that most of these jobs are at public universities will give cover to the meddlesome and the envious among us that arrogantly like to decide what other peoples’ contributions are. If they are overpaid…the market will react and the contract dollars will dry up. The fact of the matter is college football is big business and a good coach and program can end up being the most high profile aspect of a university and their effort to stand out to the public. The fact that some hangers-on and wanna-bes end up paying their guy too much in an attempt to make it to the top is something for the president and board of that university to consider…and socialits to wring their hands over.
Do college presidents have the power to cut their coach’s salaries in half?
I doubt it. It would be great if they did, but I doubt they could.
At a school that understands the proper place for sports, like the University of Virginia, the president could. But at many other schools, the president simply could not do it. He would be overruled by the Board of Visitors.
The president’s attempt would be seen as the equivalent as almost dropping the football program, for instance. Rival recruiters would tell prospects that the fact that the head coach’s salary had been drastically-reduced is a sign that that school was about to actually DROP football! Whether this was going to happen is irrelevant. Prospects would believe the rumors.
The only players that would go to the school would be ones that no other big-time schools wanted. And then what would happen? Most likely, fans would refuse to give money for scholarships until the president was fired. Remember, scholarship money is only given because fans want winning football and men’s basketball programs!
But that scholarship money goes to pay for scholarships for 20 other teams, including all of the women’s teams. All women’s teams, including the women’s basketball team, lose money. And all men’s teams, with the exception of the football team and men’s basketball team, lose money.
To make it short, I think that although it would be fantastic to do something like cutting the salary of a football coach who makes $2 million-a-year in half, I think that over a few years, it might destroy the entire athletic department, even if other schools followed suit. The entire NCAA would have to be restructured for that to work, not to mention the fact that federal laws might have to be passed to relieve universities of any responsibility to give equal opportunites for female athletes, because dozens of female athletes at every big-time school are on full schoolarships.
pjohn—the UVA has an operating budget of $2.25 billion dollars, employs over 15,000 full time workers, and includes a medical school and a law school. It is ranked as one of the top public universities in the country.
The president earns under $1 million per year, and if he is anything like the president of my PhD university, he spends a lot of his time working the donors for fundraising, pushing the faculty to win more grants to fund their research, and dealing with legislators and groups like AAUP, the General Assembly, and the NCAA.
Do you actually think university presidents are like assistant football coaches, and that the UVA Board should send out a low-ball salary when the try to replace the current president?
Or that professors work to get tenure so they can then stop working?
Please, please tell me you didn’t attend a Virginia public college or university. It would be sad if you did so and are so mis-informed as to the reality of what it takes to run a university, why university presidents are paid what their are paid to do what they do, and why professors are granted tenure as a mechanism to protect their research and writing from political suppression.
The genie is out of the bottle, the horse has left the barn. Too much money is being paid by too many people that university presidents are nothing more than figureheads when it comes to athletics.
woody, I feel your pain but part of capitalism is that we can not limit earnings people make. People make what people are willing to pay for them. Trust me, the person who finds the cure for cancer or solves world hunger will make more than all these coaches combined. Unfortunately, there are people out there that enjoy going to school and wind up with a PhD and never get anywhere close to accomplishing anything productive with their research. Some PhDs become wildly successfull and reap financial benefits.
We have a current administration that is taking the heads of major corporations, most of these CEOs bust their butt in HS to go onto Ivy League colleges and make straight As. They take internships instead of frat parties and spring breaks. they go to the best grad schools and bust their but throughout their careers. they sacrifice family, relationships and many other things to get to the top and now Obama wants to say they are overpaid. Well they may not be doing a good job, but it is the job of the shareholder to remover them or lower pay. I can guarantee that most of these CEOs work MUCH harder than any of these coaches.
Anyways, i like your approach Woody because you are telling the facts and you are right. these people are overpaid grossly. And you are telling us what is needed to be done: get the executive branch of the college/university to act. I really believe with this economic downturn more pressure from alumunus will come in to trim AD budgets way before you cut academic programs.
The same method should be used to reduce college presidents’ salaries. That and eliminating tenure that protects bad professors’ jobs would help reduce the out-of-control tuition increases.
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