Economy no factor in pay of college coaches

The legend of Bear Bryant includes a reported stipulation in his contract that seems quaint today, like a doo-wop melody. To protect the appearance of proportion and propriety, Alabama always would keep his salary at least a dollar less than that of the university’s president.

“One of the problems with doing that, if in fact you had that rule [at every college] today, presidents might find a way to get paid a lot more,” laughed Smith College sports economist Andrew Zimbalist. He is a noted cynic when it comes to the salaries paid the modern coach.

Even in an economic era when it seems everything else is shrinking, the pay scale for college head football and men’s basketball coaches keeps letting out its belt another notch.

States face huge deficits, and

universities struggle with cutbacks and tuition hikes (the Georgia University system cut $239 million from its budget for the current fiscal year, with potentially more cuts on the horizon). But the CEO positions in certain athletics departments seemingly are impervious to any downward drag.

University of Georgia President Michael Adams made $595,000 last year. Georgia football coach Mark Richt made a reported $2.8 million. And he makes more than a million dollars less than Alabama’s Nick Saban, and a million-and-a-half less than USC’s Pete Carroll.

And as Bulldogs athletics director Damon Evans goes shopping for a new basketball coach, he has declared price no object. The new guy almost certainly will command more than the old one, and Dennis Felton made $761,000 a year.

“At the end of the day, like any other business, you pay what the market bears,” Evans said.

Big business

The sports marketplace traditionally has operated on a different plane than the real-world one. In 1930, Babe Ruth was questioned about making more than then-president Herbert Hoover. “I had a better year than Hoover,” Ruth famously responded.

Three weeks ago, during a postgame interview session, UConn basketball coach Jim Calhoun was asked by an activist/writer to defend his $1.6 million salary in light of the state of Connecticut’s nearly $1 billion deficit.

Calhoun’s response will not be assigned to the same annals as Ruth’s: “My best advice to you is to shut up.”

It gets a little tricky when you begin poking around another man’s wallet.

Today’s coach is at the lead of a large enterprise. Richt, for example, oversees a football program that accounted for $67.05 million in revenue from July 2007 to July 2008, according to U.S. Department of Education figures. Recently, the UGA athletics department announced it was returning to the university’s general fund $2 million a year for the next three years.

At Georgia and Tech, the athletics departments operate on different budgets than the universities, overseen by separate athletics associations. Much of any big-time coach’s salary comes from outside deals, such as television/radio shows and shoe contracts. Thus the modern coach often appears to occupy an orbit apart from the financial concerns of the campus.

But if it is as Evans contends, that, “I don’t like to look at us as a separate entity; without the university, we wouldn’t exist,” then should athletics departments more closely mirror the state of their universities?

The debate over coaches’ salaries may be gaining momentum as the economy worsens.

“I think that is a huge issue in the minds of people who are losing their shirts right now,” said Bill Curry, former football coach at Georgia Tech, Alabama and Kentucky, and soon to lead the new program at Georgia State.

“They look around at coaches who are making a fortune, and it seems so unfair. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, it just is. I think people are upset.”

Curry will make a relatively modest $350,000 as the Georgia State head coach, certainly more than he made when he started at Georgia Tech in 1980 ($42,000) but comparable to his deals at Alabama (around $380,000 total in the late 1980s) and Kentucky ($300,000, 1990-96).

“Everybody is going to hear the question,” said Paul Hewitt, whose Georgia Tech basketball package is worth a reported $1.3 million a year. “Not just coaches. You’ve got CEOs having to answer [about salaries]. That’s just the way it is.”

How much, then, is too much?

A thorny question, both practically and ethically.

Free marketers always will suggest that competition for talent drives the process.

That, of course, is the view within the coaching ranks, but it also can be heard out there in academia.

According to state figures, the highest-paid professor at Georgia Tech makes $385,000. At Georgia, the top pay is $271,000. That’s the peak. The average, obviously, is less. And aren’t professors the ones who really define the mission of a university?

Still, one Tech professor who responded to an e-mail inquiry sent randomly to various faculty members at Georgia and Tech begrudged the coaches nothing.

“Excellence in any field, athletics, academics, top administrators, comes from competing in the market for the best,” Tech management professor Terry Blum wrote. “I, for one, believe that we should be best in anything that we undertake. If excellence is a goal and the best talent is expensive because of the market, then the institution needs to meet the market.”

Critic sounds off

But to critics like Zimbalist, “the market is rigged.”

Rigged, he said, because coaches are profiting from players who are not paid beyond their scholarships. When Zimbalist heard Calhoun’s contention that the Huskies’ basketball program brings in $12 million to the university, justifying his salary, the economist was not impressed.

“What he’s saying is, ‘Every single penny generated by the men’s team is because of me.’ That is so unbelievably absurd that it doesn’t even deserve commentary,” he said. “He’s not playing. His students are playing. He’s probably not even doing the bulk of the recruiting. He has assistant coaches doing the recruiting.”

Mostly, Zimbalist argues, the market is rigged by those who place too high a value on the coaches’ talents. They could not command a comparable salary anywhere else in the workplace, he argues. Plus, they would do their jobs for considerably less with no drop-off in production.

“I just think we’ve allowed the subset of individuals to bamboozle us and monopolize that market. And in the process of doing so, they waste a lot of money,” Zimbalist said.

His opinion seems to be in the minority, a dissenting voice lost in the roar of the crowd.

“It comes down to, what is the value system of the culture?” Curry said. “In the value system of this culture, a coach who can go into a high-pressure situation and win big is worth a certain amount of money. If the value system were different, if it were predicated on accomplishment in academics or in social action or other important things, it would be a different system, obviously.”

Curry continued, “People who think coaches and [professional] players are overpaid, they’re in complete control in a free market and they always have been. All they have to do is not go to the games and turn off the television. [Salaries] will go down, that’s just a fact of life. Pay will drop drastically if you keep not watching.”

There are few signs today’s market has any interest in that, the bulls significantly outnumbering the bears.