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Where the money is
From USA Today:
Following the lead of the $5million football coach, athletics directors might be next to hit the college sports salary jackpot.
ADs average about $450,000 at the NCAA’s top-tier schools, according to a USA TODAY analysis, rivaling the pay of many university presidents. But at least six ADs make more than $1million, and since August 2010, at least 10 public schools have given their ADs pay raises of $75,000 or more.
The job has gone from coach emeritus to one that has attracted at least one former multinational CEO: Dave Brandon, who at Domino’s Pizza oversaw more than $6billion in annual sales and 180,000 employees. As athletics director at the University of Michigan, his $700,454 pay is lower than some of his employees’.
At top NCAA programs, athletics directors handle $100million budgets, steer licensing and media contracts totaling several times that and manage facilities worth billions. The best ADs are rainmakers who make the deals and align the stars that finance big-time athletics. And if pay for top talent in the 120-school Football Bowl Subdivision is a market — as many argue to justify the rocketing salaries of head and assistant coaches — then AD pay appears headed for the up escalator.
Few ADs are more aware of their market value than Brandon. In 2009, he made more than $4.2million — including stock, options and incentives — according to Domino’s company statements. As Michigan’s AD, his salary is less than that of Michigan’s defensive coordinator, Greg Mattison, who makes $750,000.
Even so, Brandon’s pay is nearly double his predecessor’s. “Certainly I wanted to be paid fairly and competitively,” says Brandon, 59, a former Michigan football player and Michigan regent. “But obviously, if everything I was about in this stage of my career was making as much money as possible, I would have stayed.”
Bringing in former CEOs to run athletic departments is likely to increase, especially as cash-strapped schools are increasingly insisting that athletics run without subsidies and student fees (only seven did in 2010).
“I think you will see more people making the transition and doing it gladly,” says Andy Dolich, a former pro sports executive who consults with schools, including Michigan, for marketing giant IMG. There’s evidence they might bring their salaries with them. Among the top schools, about one in 12 ADs make more than $900,000.
“There has been an explosion in cost that bothers me enormously,” says LSU chancellor Michael Martin, whose school recently gave AD Joe Alleva a $175,000 raise when Tennessee expressed interest. “On the other hand, I’m contributing … doing exactly what I’ve done.”
All in the name of education, all done as a tax-exempt non-profit.
Plenty to be concerned about here: For one thing, is it appropriate to have “non-profit” status for organizations which pay their executives and other employees so highly? Increasingly, it seems as if the tag “non-profit” means simply that there are no pesky shareholders with whom the loot must be shared. (This issues is by no means limited to college athletics.) And there is plenty of reason to be concerned about distraction from the supposed educational mission of universities. And the question about whether these teams *really* cover their costs and generate true profit for their parent institutions.
Regarding the latter: At a bare minimum, these activities should be organized in such a form that all costs and revenues are clearly and publicly identified, with financial statements sworn to under penalty of law by the athletic director, university president, and university CFO, in the same way that corporate financial statements must be certified under Sarbanes-Oxley.
Hi David — More fuel for the fire here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-16/rutgers-boosting-athletics-at-expense-of-academics-fails-to-emulate-texas.html
Key quote:
UT is an exception–their football is so profitable that it actually subsidizes academics. UC Berkeley is making their sports programs share in the belt tightening. But these examples are not the norm.
My dream solution is for NCAA D-1 football to be spun off as a private business (the Collegiate Football League?) that would pay the universities to lease stadiums and use team names/logos. The CFL would hire the coaches, pay the players, make the deals with ESPN, etc., etc., and the colleges’ only involvement with the sport would be to cash the lease checks from the league. The goal is a structure in which the private sector takes on the expenses and risks in return for most of the profits. There’s SO much money involved that surely there’s enough for all three main players (the league, the networks, and the schools). Obviously certain questions (e.g. player eligibility; compensation for schools whose teams are lousy but needed to round out schedules; rules to safeguard university reputations) would require a lot of thought and negotiation, but the result could hardly be worse than the way things are now. The main thing is to get a better deal for the players and get the colleges off the hook for these incredible expenses.
My students struggle to write a simple sentence, but they all know to write “s/he”. I can’t mention Jane Austen to talk about marriage and the family, because they have never read Austen, but they have dutifully memorized deconstructing heteronormative commodifications of whatever. Me, I think students end up learning a lot more from the athletic program than they do from the professors, and the athletic directors are probably underpaid, at least relative to the professors.
In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed is an article about the budget woes of West Virginia University Tech, where, “in the past 10 years, enrollment…has dropped by nearly half.” To remain open, Tech needs $35 million short-term and $100 million long-term, and obviously that kind of money isn’t going to be easy to come by. But what really got me was the article’s list of proposed solutions to Tech’s woes, one of which is this: “Cutting the football team, which eats up about 11 percent of the institution’s total budget.”
ELEVEN percent?
Maybe the football program can justify its budget in terms of the late Culture Wars, a la William above. Great potential matchups for future Budget Committee meetings: the homespun wisdom and Rockwellian values of the coaching staff vs. the evils of deconstruction! Ara Parseghian vs. Paul de Man! Hoosiers vs. Social Text! Jane Austen and the Patriarchal Family vs. Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl!