Infographic: Is Your State's Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably)

[grahamhgreen]

There are at least three problems.

Coaches don't generate revenue on their own; you could make the exact same case for the student-athletes who actually play the game and score the points and fracture their legs.

It can be tough to attribute this revenue directly to the performance of the head coach. In 2011-2012, Mack Brown was paid $5 million to lead a mediocre 8-5 Texas team to the Holiday Bowl. The team still generated $103.8 million in revenue, the most in college football. You don't have to pay someone $5 million to make college football profitable in Texas.

This revenue rarely makes its way back to the general funds of these universities. Looking at data from 2011-2012, athletic departments at 99 major schools lost an average of $5 million once you take out revenue generated from "student fees" and "university subsidies." If you take out "contributions and donations"—some of which might have gone to the universities had they not been lavished on the athletic departments—this drops to an average loss of $17 million, with just one school (Army) in the black. All this football/basketball revenue is sucked up by coach and AD salaries, by administrative and facility costs, and by the athletic department's non-revenue generating sports; it's not like it's going to microscopes and Bunsen burners.

http://deadspin.com/infographic-is-your-states-highest-paid-employee-a-co-489635228

[Octafish]

1. “Football is the ballet of the masses.” ― Dmitri Shostakovich

Basketball and the rest of it, too, demonstrate the importance of the circus to the Ownership Class.

Personally, I can't get enough of the mob's Bolshoi. Football. Football. Football.

The thing is, those blue states are the ones that have their priorities right. Truth. Science. Medicine. The Law. They are what bring true progress.

[fishwax]

5. The blue states just don't have public universities in BCS conferences

Most of the blue states don't have schools playing division 1 football. I think only two blue states on that map have teams in the NCAA D-1 Bowl Subdivision: Nevada (two schools) and Massachusetts (which has only had an FBS team since 2012). None of the three schools are in major conferences, though.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. So the solution would be to get rid of the conferences, yes?

Think of all the public money it would save. As you point out, it's the existence of conferences that is causing the problem.

[WinkyDink]

2. Hardly. I think half of Hollywood would get more than a John Wooden. And CEO's? Goldman-Sachs?

[NYC_SKP]

3. State employees; people employed by the state, an agency or state college...

Is what they mean.

[LittleBlue]

4. The amount of money football generates far exceeds its costs

Football is big money, and it supports a lot of sports programs that normally wouldn't have the money to fund them. At some schools, the football TV rights and ticket revenue bankrolls the entire sports department.

If you're not competitive, you won't generate the money. And that means coaches who can recruit and develop talent, expensive coaches. Poor coaching has caused countless schools to go into decline when their boosters stop donating. My alma mater is sadly one of them.

[Fumesucker]

7. We are so far beyond fucked that the light from fucked won't reach us for ten billion years n/t

[cali]

8. Nope.

[Egalitarian Thug]

9. If one wanted to demonstrate the fundamental problem with America in one graphic,

this one would be an excellent candidate.
& R