Those Pricey Amateurs

The head of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a nonprofit, makes $763,000 a year. Maybe Myles Brand is worth that. Maybe Brand's speeches on the "inappropriate intrusion of commercialism" and his vow that "college sports must not be allowed to be drawn to the professional model like a moth drawn to a flame" are just what we need.

But I'm pretty sure you can get such hot air for $200K, $300K tops. Look at Congress.

Comments

[Mo]

Gee, it's a good thing the players don't get paid. Otherwise the whole system could get corrupted by the taint of money

[JimInNoVA]

Yeah. I'd hate to see what would happen if some rich, snobbish hypocrite managed to get control of the whole thing.

[fountainhead]

Speaking as a lifelong Hoosier and an IU grad, I can tell you that Mr. Brand isn't worth two shits.

AND, he was responsible for the crusade to fire Bobby Knight. He is NOT well liked in this state.

[Dan Lewis]

While in no way a fan of Brand or his NCAA, this _has_ to be less than what he made as President of IU. And the NCAA has to attract the "best" candidates for the job (BTW NCAA, I'm available as of June '05), so what's the big deal?

[Steve in CA]

Dan,

I highly doubt that he made more at IU. I'm not sure what the president of that university makes (I'm sure you could look it up), but here in California, chancellors of the top public universities make about $250,000 a year.

[Warren]

No nonprofit employee should ever be permitted to collect 3/4 of a million in compensation.

[Toohey]

Roark,

You're right. Bobby Knight is a saint. I think he's just misunderstood.
Jeez, strangle one kid and they make you out to be a maniac.

[Fred]

According to this article, Brand's replacement at IU makes $335,000, or less than half what he makes at the NCAA. But maybe we need to quantify the salary based on $ per useless pontification.

[ron]

"non profit" should not even exist.

[Swamp Justice]

Now we know why the NCAA is a non-profit! 😉

[JimInNoVA]

There was much raging and ganshing of teeth when it was reported that PSU's president Spanier was makin over $320K a year, plus the host of benefits that come with being a university president (like a house, car, air travel, and most meals). I highly doubt that any public university could justify over $750K in president's salery to its board of trustees.

[Mark Anderson]

"No nonprofit employee should ever be permitted to collect 3/4 of a million in compensation."

Non-profits have revenue and the NCAA has a lot. (millions from television contracts alone.) So shouldn't compensation be based on revenue generation whether it's non-profit or not?

[JJB]

Mark Anderson -

The point is that it's hypocritical for Brand as president of the NCAA to criticize college sports becoming just like professional sports and being commercial enterprises, while the NCAA itself has all the trappings and appearances of a commercial enterprise while denying that it is one.

In addition, it's hypocrisy to insist that the talent (i.e., the athletes) that generates all those millions in revenue for the NCAA and its member schools aren't allowed to collect on a fair share of those millions (a full scholarship, while a nice award, is not commensurate with the millions in revenues that those same athletes bring in).

The NCAA is a big business, and big-time college sports programs are effectively professional leagues. It's hypocritical to pretend otherwise, which is what the NCAA and the college administrations want to do because it is so profitable for them.

[Roark]

Yo, Ellsworth, the kid needed choking.

[dj of raleigh]

I went to college on a full grant-in-aid.
That's when football stopped being full.
I'm for NO athletic grants to students,
no requirement to play ball to attend,
to get in, to stay in, to do anything.
The jock/student should be just a student
playing for the fun of it.

I am totally against professional collegiate players,
eg, players being paid.

The reason today's players are being given
women, drugs and alcohol, is that is the player
that they must recruit today to be competitive.

Get the money out of all colllege sports.
You don't need a college degree in Parks & Recreation.

[Lucas Wiman]

I just wish that sports at my old school would have been treated more as a commercial matter. Students were charged for arena and activity fees whether or not they ever went to a sports game. The team consistently lost, and hence consistently lost money for the school. It should have been shitcanned, but wasn't.

[dlc]

re: "non profit" should not even exist.

Why not? A 501(c)3 nonprofit corporation is just another corporate governance designation. It's madate is that it must be controlled by a board and adhere to a fairly stict set of articles and bylaws while directing excess revenue into reserves or operations, but it still files an operating agreement/articles of incorporation, as any other LLC, S Corp, LP, etc. The 501(c)3 designation is a tax designation, as in, the company pays no taxes. An "S" Corp's tax designation differs from a "C" Corp's and an LP's and some pay more more tax than others. So what?

Or is that they have no tax liability? Then you should be arguing that all incorporated business pay a flat tax regardless of their type of incorporation...

dlc

[Dave]

I would do his job for less than half his salary as I am sure many other sports fans would as well. How hard is it to make a couple decisions a week and then go to sporting events all the time? Its not like there is a shortage of people willing to be executives. That is why he is way overpaid...

[R C Dean]

"No nonprofit employee should ever be permitted to collect 3/4 of a million in compensation."

Why not? Whether an organization is a "non-profit" (for tax purposes, anyway) has to do with whether it pays its excess earnings to owners, or devotes them instead to its non-profit mission (whatever that is).

Why shouldn't the CEO of a non-profit make exactly the same salary (without ownership-based perks like stock options, of course) as his counterpart in a for-profit? Should we force, by statute, "non-profits" to hire only second-rate employees by allowing them to to pay only second-rate wages? What would the point of that be?

I'm not saying that Brand is worth what they are paying him, I'm just saying that non-profits should be allowed to pay market rates for their people. For CEOs, that's going to be a lot of scratch.

[kevrob]

I chuckle at libertarians who root for government-owned colleges' teams. Privatize all those state schools and then whether their intercollegiate athletic organizations are bloated bureaucracies becomes a matter for alums, faculty, students and their families to complain about, as opposed to a public policy question.

Not giving "student-athletes" in a revenue-generating sport a stipend on the order of what ROTC students get is asking for corruption, though. In the days before scholarships, students were regularly paid under the table by boosters, given phony jobs if not outright envelopes of cash. Scholarships were supposed to drive that nonsense out of college sports, but they soon became corrupted by the practice of admitting players who couldn't or wouldn't make good grades. This is why schools such as those in the Ivy League deemphasized football, and seldom get deep into the NCAA roundball brackets. They don't give free rides for athletes, so have trouble attracting the best ones in the most popular sports.

A few hundred bucks in his pocket every month for his labors, along with room, board and tuition, might have convinced my alma mater's best hoopster to play another year instead of leaving for the pro game after leading the team to the Final Four. I can't blame him, he's got a wife and kid to support. Whittling down the compensation for NCAA mucky-mucks, while perhaps just, won't free up enough TV dough for the member institutions to fund such allowances, unfortunately.

Kevin

[jon]

The reason he makes so damn much is that a gang of idiots decided he was worth it. And if you want to cut off his salary, stop watching college sports.

For good or bad, sports make a hell of a lot of money for most colleges. Many departments exist only because a football team supports them financially. At my college, the athletic department used its money to help build a new student union. Sure, it was "our" money, but it wasn't something "they" had to do.

It's not a great system, but the players often do get a free education (if they attend actual classes). It's no better for the chemistry major who helps with a new patent: there's exploitation when the work and the payoff are compared. But without this socialized system (redistributed wealth under direction of elites), the college wouldn't exist as it does today. And it ain't that broke.

[David Nieporent]

For good or bad, sports make a hell of a lot of money for most colleges. Many departments exist only because a football team supports them financially.

The problem is that this is completely untrue. Most college sports programs operate in the red. Even the so-called "revenue sports" (that is, football and basketball) do at many schools, and when they do make money, they subsidize the athletic programs, not the schools as a whole. And the ones that do make money do not make "a hell of a lot of money." The exceptions can be counted on one's fingers and toes.

Read _College Sports Inc._ or the other books by Sperber; read Zimbalist's _Unpaid Professionals_; there's a few others that I can't recall off the top of my head. Rick Telander wrote a book on college sports economics about a decade ago.

Even the NCAA doesn't pretend otherwise: See this press release, which is a few years old, for an example. (Be sure to note the "without institutional support" numbers, which represent the bottom lines of the athletic departments; the "institutional support" figures include subsidies from the schools' general funds.)

To be fair, a significant portion of the red ink comes from the idiotic Title IX mandate that schools must spend millions on women's sports that nobody on the planet outside of Donna Lopiano is interested in.

[kevrob]

David is right about the profitability of college sports. One does have to remember that having a winning team or two is something the schools' fundraisers use to pry donations out of alums and other fans, and not just for building new athletic facilities. There is also the "branding effect" from schools with newly successful teams in popular sports seeing an uptick in enrollment. Some kid in East Outback has never heard of the University of New Belgium until their "Fighting Walloons" make it deep into the NCAA basketball tournament, or win the Kohler Co. Toilet Bowl, (as seen on TV.) He remembers the name when he stops at UNB's table at College Night at his high school, and the travelling sales.. ahem admissions counselor staffing the booth chats him up and provides an application. If the school might be a good fit for the prospective student, wonderful, he now has another place to apply. Not every student belongs at some mega-campus that happens to be an athletic powerhouse, though.

Kevin