Amazingly, Joe Only Makes A Little Dough

By comparison, I should hasten to add…and I haven’t ventured into the world of sports for a little while now, but I’ll do so here (and I may do so again a little later – we’ll see).

After I read here that legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno makes $512,000 a year, I thought I would hurl all over the pigskin, as it were. That is until I read this USA Today article from about a year ago that listed salaries for coaches at top-tier schools (the story mentions the at-that-time pending lawsuit over Paterno having to divulge his salary, which he should have had to do anyway as far as I’m concerned, given the fact that Penn State takes public money).

The USA Today article tells us that the actual salary of these coaches comprises about 25 percent of their compensation, with endorsements and other income sources making up the remaining amount. And subsequent to that story, this post tells us that…

Gary R. Roberts, deputy dean of Tulane University’s law school and director of its sports law program, said that only at some medical schools would you find the kind of seven-figure salaries that Brand mentions in the letter (i.e., NCAA president Myles Brand wrote a letter to Congress to defend the salaries and tax-exempt status of college sports at about the time this story broke). But even that, he said, is misleading, because the surgeons on the clinical faculty aren’t “real classroom faculty,” he said.

“It is not accurate ... to say that the overall compensation earned by major football and men’s basketball coaches today are within the order of magnitude of the highest paid classroom teaching faculty,” Roberts said in an e-mail.

And to further point this out, I’d like to find out how much money came out of the budgets of other departments of Oklahoma University to help pay for the $3.45 million yearly salary of football coach Bob Stoops (noted here). Sure, he’s a winner, but couldn’t that dough have been used to graduate more students majoring in molecular biology, for example (just a hypothetical...yes, I know - "what the market will bear").

So given all of this, it seems that Joe Pa actually deserves a pat on the back for taking what is comparatively meager compensation for what he does, given his low-endorsement profile and the high graduation rate of his student football players.

All the same, this can’t help but bum me out; it further illustrates the point that I’m in the wrong job.