An interesting USA Today story about NCAA football coach bonuses has raised eyebrows this week, with many coaches able to earn in perks far more than what other university employees (i.e. professors) make in an entire year. Aside from college fiscal priorities being questionable when coaches make exponentially more money than the folks on the front line actually teaching, the bonuses are strange enough on their own when you drill down deeper.
I fully understand how capitalism works, and that coach salaries are essentially set by what the market will bear. I also do not fault any coach for trying to earn as much as he can in wages. And even though I do believe the high college coach salaries seen today invite more concerns around integrity, corruption, and downright cheating (as has been evidenced at countless schools in recent years), I certainly don’t blame coaches for enjoying the riches of coaching in 2015. What I don’t understand, however, are the following:
- Are bonuses needed or necessary for simply asking coaches to do the job they were hired to do? Using the same employer (universities), professors do not receive pay bonuses for superior work, as they are expected to teach at a high level, publish, and conduct research. Professors can earn annual cost of living raises and tenure for long-term job security, but they don’t make 6-figure bonuses for simply doing the job they were hired to do.
- Is it really necessary to add big bonuses on top of already monster contracts for college coaches? In other words, are these coaches really that irreplaceable as the article suggests? Perhaps you could make the argument for coaches who annually produce a top 10 team (still a stretch for me personally based on #1 above), but what about the rest of the coaches on the list — many who rarely win conference championships or earn bowl game appearances? Do colleges really need to offer big bonuses to keep mediocre/bad coaches?
Again, kudos to the coaches benefiting from today’s coach salary explosion — it’s certainly a great time to be a college football coach. Conversely, the best tag I can hang on colleges today who seem to be mindlessly upping the ante with salaries and bonuses is that it’s a case of pluralistic ignorance, and that these big bucks are being offered more because “everybody is doing it” than they are because they necessarily think it’s right.
Will the bubble ever break? That remains to be seen, but for now it seems like simply being a college football coach — even a mediocre one — will make you a very wealthy individual!
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