In Baton Rouge, there's a $100 million football coach and everyone else

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

BATON ROUGE — Sitting alone in the dimly lit kitchen, Chris Toombs cradles his bedraggled iPhone, searching for holiday gifts for his three children. Books, electronics, clothes.

He clicks on a blue quarter-zip for his younger son. Then he flicks the cracked screen upward, sees the price, $27, and clicks his teeth. Too much for his paycheck from Louisiana State University.

-snip-

For this, he makes $12,000 per year and has his graduate school tuition waived, enough to make him feel both accomplished and destitute. He graduated high school early, has a bachelor’s degree, even once ran for political office. Yet sitting here two weeks before Christmas, on the verge of asking his mother to buy Christmas gifts for his kids, Chris exists on one side of a vast wealth gap that divides his employer, his city, his country.

-snip-

Brian Kelly, hired days earlier as the school’s football coach, exists on the other end of the wealth divide. He left Notre Dame to sign the most valuable contract in the history of college football: 10 years, a guaranteed annual salary of at least $9 million, and with bonuses it could be worth more than $100 million.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/01/08/baton-rouge-theres-100-million-football-coach-everyone-else/

I should add I'm a sports fan, a Seahawks season ticket holder but this is fucking ridiculous.

[pfitz59]

1. This disparity ought be illegal

State employee salary caps.

[caraher]

2. That would buck every current trend

Not to say that there shouldn't be such limits... but (from about a year ago)...

[crickets]

19. That is so depressing. nt

[J_William_Ryan]

3. ArkLaMiss

America’s Third World country.

[hatrack]

4. "ArkLaMiss" - I like it! Kind of like Benelux, but broke-dick and with fire ants . . .

[Vinca]

5. That's shameful and downright obscene, but isn't all of sports that way? You look at some baseball

player or basketball star making millions of dollars while there are homeless encampments around the stadium. Life seems to be a game of luck and genetics since I doubt many of the overpaid athletes are any brighter than the rest of us poor slobs.

[YP_Yooper]

6. Tell me again why is college so expensive?

Beuller? Beuller? Beuller? Beuller? [link:

|

...and I'm in the Big 10 boat (and well, the Steelers). Went to Ohio State, family Michigan, childhood friends, Penn State and they all show up on the map - but for crying out loud!!!

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

7. College sports is usually financed by gate receipts and alumni donations

It's not supposed to use public money.

It might be different in Louisiana but leagues like the PAC12 are self financed.

[YP_Yooper]

9. It's like that out here

but that money should be used by the University and sent to the general fund for the benefit of all.

Without the University, there would be no football team and no money.

[sir pball]

15. LSU sports is self financed

And the sports money can't go to the school writ large, so the educational facilities crumble while the football team builds new, completely unneeded practice fields and weight rooms just to burn the money off.

Source, my wife is an alumna.

[former9thward]

8. There are a lot of reasons college is expensive.

But the salary of a football coach is not one of them. The football programs pay for themselves with TV revenue and ticket sales.

[Torchlight]

10. In every instance?

[Homoudont]

12. At LSU

At LSU the football team is separate from the university. There is no state funding or anything out of the university budget for the football team. In fact the LSU football team contributes millions each year to the general budget.

Every school is unique in how they handle the revenue generated by football. This is just what LSU does. Penn state football uses excess money to fund every other sport on campus.

[YP_Yooper]

11. You're right if you count just the coach

but let's add in the whole football program.

I still believe in what I posted above:

but that money should be used by the University and sent to the general fund for the benefit of all. Without the University, there would be no football team and no money.

[YP_Yooper]

13. OK, I may eat my words, but this is interesting from my old school

some excepts (keeping in mind this is from Ohio State, so just a little biased) :

At $109,382,222 for the current year, Ohio State’s athletic budget is the largest in the nation and the biggest in the history of college sports. It allows the school to field 36 varsity teams in everything from baseball and soccer to riflery and synchronized swimming. The school spends about $110,000 on each of its 980 athletes every year, which is triple the amount the university spends per undergraduate on education. (keep in mind this does not include the free tuition for the athletes)

Ohio State was one of just 19 schools to turn a profit on athletics. Last year, Rutgers cited budget shortfalls for its decision to cancel six sports, including swimming, men’s tennis and fencing. But the athletic department still gave assistant football coaches a sizable raise, completed a $12.5 million renovation of football’s training complex

Last year, the issue of swelling athletic-department budgets was taken up in Washington by the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. In a strongly worded letter to NCAA President Myles Brand, former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas criticized “highly paid coaches with no academic duties,” and wrote that Division I football and men’s basketball “more closely resemble professional sports than amateur sports.”

[link:https://ohiostatebuckeyes.com/inside-college-sports-biggest-money-machine/|

[former9thward]

16. What you have bolded is athletics -- not football.

But what about other departments? Does the History Dept turn a profit? Political Science? Maybe some of the science departments do if they have big research grants. But why the hit on Athletics? If you did not participate in athletics when you went to school, it does not mean other students don't want to participate.

[YP_Yooper]

17. True but at OSU, football IS athletics

but the universities and their depts shouldn't be profit centers for their own benefit. Tuition, Fed/state/local funding, donations, endowments and grants all feed into the larger university. I know OSU doesn't doesn't give bonuses to the research teams for their grants they win. Why should income for sports be any different? In another article, OSU revenue was over $230 million for '19-'20, yet found a way to spend $240 million when prior year the expenses were half that.

For 2021, coach has an OSU salary of $230,000 along with a host of 47 others, and then gets a big taste of all those broadcasting and other rights that are really OSU rights, not the coach.

Then you take sponsorships for the athletes that they only have because of the school, and the topic just gets bigger. ie, why spend scholarship money on an athlete that then gets compensated for playing at OSU? They simply wouldn't have the monetary opportunity if they played at Youngstown State, Ohio.

[Doc Sportello]

14. The disparity is real but the financial take is misleading

Big time football programs like LSU are not only self-supporting but actually cover the costs of other men's and women's sports, so they don't come out of the university budget. For example, the growth we've seen in women's college sports in terms of facilities and scholarships wouldn't have been possible without the revenue generated by football and to a lesser extent, men's basketball. Below those top tier programs, though, all the other men's and women's sports lose money and get funding from their schools.

The misleading part is the misconception that coaches salaries, such as Kelly's and others like Saban, are paid by the university or state. The vast majority of those funds come from outside income streams such as tv or other deals that are just a way to funnel money to the coach over and above their annual salary and that come primarily from the largess of big money types. The coach may be the highest-paid state employee as an annual salary from public money but the big bucks of those contracts come from the donors.

Is it ridiculous that they make so much more than an average worker at the school? Yes, but college football, especially, is a cash cow just like the NFL. Schools are hiring these coaches at these amounts because the want to stay in the game of generating revenue that pays for other sports, so they don't have to in these days of declining revenue from the state.

Income inequality is real and getting worse. But if you're one who's ok with it in other realms such as a big fan of Bezos and Amazon, you can't complain about it in this sphere.

[Zeitghost]

18. The financial reality is

That big time football coaches and the winning they bring are far more valuable and bring in far more revenue to an institution than a graduate student does. So they make far more money or they take their talents elsewhere. Supply and demand, there are only a handful of people who can successfully manage a top 10 D1 football program and thousands who can successfully be grad students.


A successful football program funds hundreds of scholarships, many for disadvantaged kids who would otherwise never attend a top university. They also contribute significantly, both directly and indirectly to academics.