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Morris: Coaches' raises too costly a trend
Florida is the latest example of the college game’s destructive gluttony
Posted on 08.11.09
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YOU WILL NEVER HEAR me complain about the astronomical salaries being paid to professional athletes these days. They are paid fair market value. What I have a problem with are the rapidly escalating salaries of college football coaches because they do not operate in the same free-market system.
The $24 million, six-year contract recently offered to Florida coach Urban Meyer underscored the myriad problems facing college athletics. Meyer gained a substantial raise at the same time the University of Florida is undergoing budget cuts and trimming faculty positions.
Florida officials will defend Meyer’s new contract by saying he should be the highest paid coach in the country because he is the top coach in the land. It is difficult to argue against that thinking since Florida has won two of the past three BCS championships and is the odds-on favorite to win it again.
Those same Florida folks will tell you the school’s University Athletic Association is a self-operating organization and not one penny of Meyer’s contract will be paid from state university funds. Florida likes to tout that the Athletic Association has contributed $17.3 million to the university since Meyer arrived in 2005.
If that is not defense enough for Meyer’s bloated paycheck, consider also that he has committed $1 million to the university’s Florida Opportunity Scholars Program. Admirable, no doubt.
Here is the rub: College athletics programs still operate within university systems. That alone alters the free-market concept. Within a university system are different parameters — and guidelines — for paying or rewarding any employee.
So, while Meyer gets filthy rich, it goes against the grain of how the university is currently operating. His new contract was announced shortly after the University of Florida detailed $42 million in budget cuts, laid off nine faculty members and eliminated 42 staff positions.
This is not intended to single out Meyer or the University of Florida. The two parties represent only the latest financial move within a system that has lost its balance. Alabama, LSU, Tennessee and Southern California were previous players in the game. In fact, the system began to tilt off-kilter in June of 2007 when Nick Saban was lured from the Miami Dolphins to coach at Alabama with an eight-year, $32 million contract.
Before you knew it, Les Miles was getting a more lucrative contract than Saban. Then Meyer’s was bigger and better than Miles’. Should Texas win the national championship this year, there is little doubt coach Mack Brown will leapfrog all of them.
That is the way it works in a free-market system. The five highest salaries in Major League Baseball history all were signed in the past two years. Alex Rodriguez signed the highest contract ever in 2008 for $27.5 annually. Another player will undoubtedly get more in the next year or so.
More power to Rodriguez, C.C. Sabathia, Johan Santana and all the other top-dollar players in the game. If the New York Yankees and New York Mets could not afford to pay those salaries, trust me, they would not.
But college athletics is different. It operates under a wholly different system, one tied to the university because the athletes are students. Every college and university in the country is struggling through difficult times.
The sagging national economy is forcing colleges to change their ways to make ends meet. Tuition at nearly every school is skyrocketing. Budgets are being slashed. Teaching positions are being eliminated. Fund-raising is falling flat.
In the end, the message sent by paying football coaches exorbitant salaries is sad and self-defeating. The spike in salaries during difficult financial times conveys the message that athletics are bigger than the university. No wonder college presidents are opposed to a football playoff system, where the money generated will escalate further while continuing to push athletics away from academics.
South Carolina is fortunate to have an athletics director who is cognizant of how his program fits into the university system. It also is fortunate to have a head football coach who understands these are difficult financial times.
“Basically, theoretically, across the board, we’ve maintained the position in concert and harmony with the university as far as raises and no raises,” said Eric Hyman, who has distributed information concerning university struggles nationwide to all of his coaches.
While Hyman believed first-year men’s basketball coach Darrin Horn deserved a raise following a season in which his club tied for first place in the SEC East, the athletics director also knew the timing was not right to propose one to the board of trustees.
The same sense of perspective holds true for Spurrier, whose $1.8 million annual salary now ranks ninth among the 12 SEC coaches. Spurrier said he has no plans to request he be compensated better.
“I’m way down there. I’m way down there. That’s all right,” Spurrier said of SEC salaries. “We haven’t done enough for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ If we ever did anything big, we may have reason to. As long as we finish about the middle of the pack, that’s about what I deserve to be paid.”
Maybe the day will come when Spurrier leads USC to an SEC championship and could command a higher salary. His income should escalate dramatically ... unless, of course, the economy continues to falter, USC further trims its budget and cuts corners on the academic side.
Then USC would be wise to buck the current trend of escalating coaches’ salaries and heed the hard times facing the university. That is the way college athletics should work.
Listen to Morris Tuesdays from 4-5 p.m. on ESPN Radio 93.1 FM.
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