Jay Coulter wrote up a lot of thoughts that more or less mirror mine about the role of college football (and more generally, sport) in US society:
If you make $50,000 a year, your hourly wage for a 40-hour work week is $24.04.
If Saban worked 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, his average hourly wage would be $1,923.08.
Each day, you make $192.31, while Saban makes $15,384.62.
Your weekly paycheck is $961.54; Saban’s is $76,923.08.
It would take you 80 years to earn what Saban makes in one year.
That’s 1.78 lifetimes* to earn the average $4 million that Saban makes each year in his eight-year contract.
Spurred by this sentence:
I’m as big a capitalist as the next person and many of you are probably saying Saban is worth it because Alabama is willing to pay it.
I wrote the following comment:
Well, first of all I’m not aware of any corporation called Alabama. There’s a state and a university by that name, and I’d imagine it’s the latter which is supposed to be a non-profit educational institution cutting his checks. (Yeah, I just implied that an SEC football factory is an educational institution rather than a sports institution with an education unit attached. I’m quaint like that, but everyone knows we Vandy fans don’t really get it.)
However, it is certainly the market operating in the sense that any coach’s salary reflects only what the boosters and other fans are willing to pay. Until the public literally takes more pride in the local institution’s physics dept. than the football team, that’s not likely to change. It may require people starving in the streets or at least unable to buy tickets and merch before anything changes. I hope we don’t get to that point.
Since the NCAA is not exactly a market of corporations, but rather an organization of colleges that can and do collude to set ground rules for fair play, I’d love to see a consensus develop that would put sport in its place. Not sure what that would look like in the concrete: Salary cap for coaches (and maybe even players)? Mandate that each dollar of facilities spending be matched by a certain amount of academic spending? I’d love to hear suggestions.
Of course any attempt to get the horse back in the barn is going to be met by howls from somebody. Florida and Texas will claim a coaching salary freeze keeps them from their rightful competitive advantages. Boise State or Utah or maybe even Vanderbilt can claim that a facilities freeze unfairly prevents them from upgrades needed to compete. Someone’s going to be unhappy with that outcome.