Sending Subliminal Signals In Our Nation's Capital

that Curley doesn’t want a cap at his own position.

They’ll never, ever cap coaching salaries. Ever.

(Ever.)

Besides, even if they did find a way to cap a coach’s salary at, say, $1,000,000, the universities would find a way to supplement it. Joe Paterno can bring in $500,000 and it’ll be a bargain. Why? Well, partially because he leads a relatively simple life in State College, but also because he has his hands in a bunch of other moneymaking projects and doesn’t really need $2.5M in straight salary. If you’re a transient coach like 98% of the guys who sign these huge deals, you’re not attached to the community to the point where things like real estate deals are a viable/safe investment. I doubt RichRod is snatching up houses to flip in Detroit. But if you’re Joe Paterno and have been in one place for 60 years, that sort of thing becomes pretty easy.

But even if they capped salaries, there’s sponsorship money, booster money, Nike/Adidas money, etc. There’s no way to keep track of it all.

And talking about what a great job they’re doing protecting the student-athlete while smoking $100 cigars and drinking $1,000 scotch. It’s a joke. They may as well hand out pacifiers and little blankets to all of us so we can sleep at night.

How do you pretend to address a problem without actually giving enough of a shit to change things? Blue ribbon commission. The article could’ve been two sentences long:

NCAA vice president Wally Renfro agreed that reform won’t come unless the top schools get behind it. “Until those institutions feel the need to make a change,” Renfro said, “it’s not likely that you’re going to see it.”

Okay, so who’s going to tell the big SEC schools, Ohio State, Michigan, Oklahoma, Texas, and USC to clean up their act? I trust tobacco companies’ cancer research more than I trust anything having to do with reforming the NCAA. Sure, they’ll bomb SMU back to the stone age, but they’ll never touch Alabama or USC.

The Knight Commission has been occasionally suggesting that congress or some other governing body should step in and cap coaching salaries to control costs.

What a great idea. Congress is really good at controlling costs.

WTF, is the Knight Commission purposely trying to ruin college football?

maybe Curley is against capping salaries because he knows he’s got a steal in Joe Paterno. That allows him to spend money in other areas. If Tressell’s salary is reduced to $1.5 million then Ohio State suddenly has an extra $2 million they can invest in other areas.

wouldn’t be completely surprised if Paterno has an agreement with the school that requires the AD to funnel some portion of budgeted money for Paterno’s salary to a fund that has been growing for quite some time. This fund will be used to easily pay for or supplement the HC position at PSU for years to come. Sort of like endowing a scholarship. I make this comment only half in jest.

I think in general Universities’ usage of athletic funds receives a bad wrap. I honestly think that if you poll the average person on the street, they believe that money received by the University from networks, etc goes directly into the AD or some other mythical head honcho’s pocket. Yes, these guys do make a healthy salary, but then again, they have high profile positions with an average tenure of nine months. If anything, the real evil here may be money poured into lavish facilities meant to essentially wow recruits, as Curley alluded, and not the salaries of the coaches. If the average engineering student learns in a small plastic chair with a one square foot writing surface attached, I doubt student athletes require leather EZ chairs to view game film on an 80 inch HD TV. Then again, if your offense is HD…. might be necessary.

Nothing gets me happier than logging on to BSD and seeing that slickster giving the PSU faithful the thumbs up and that poop eating grin!

American dream. You work hard, you do a good job and the market sets a salary based on a whole crap load of variables.

I guess now that we are capping Bank exec salaries of companies who were forced to take TARP money, giving UConn coaches hell for making “too much”, it is time for gov’t regulation of coaching salaries.

If we are capping salaries, why don’t we start with Hollywood? Why does Will Smith need to make $20M per pic +gross.

the slow trudge toward professionalizing an amature sport. I truely believe many of the people involved with these mega-programs are playing their hands with the goal of adapting the NFL’s lucrative business model to NCAA football.

A major component to that is how we pay head coaches. If you can pay head coaches NFL money, you can lure NFL-type coaches to come and take the reigns for a few years. As other people have said, the transient nature of the NFL HC position necesitates this high salary — because the HC becomes the CEO of a corporation. And just like a CEO, everything is in the short-term.

The problem is that when you constantly structure your goals on a 4-6 year basis, you become short-sighted, and unconcerned with how short-term actions affect the health and longevity of a program or institution decades down the line. Joe understands this, and he’s a living testament to what happens when you continue to structure your goals on a long-term basis.

Anyway, my point is more NCAAF becomes like the NFL, the worse off everyone will be except those who stand to benefit financially from this transition.

Anyway, I like the fact that the words “Cap” and “Caps” have been used so often in this thread. Tee hee hee.

I actually like the news industry comments and the fact that you are very thorough in your footnoting. You’re more entertaining to read than Adam Rittenberg’s Big Ten blog. Although that probably has more to do with the fact that this is a Penn State-first blog.

is happy seeing other schools try to compete in this escalating arms race, knowing that PSU won’t get caught up and will have a healthier bottom line going forward.