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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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It's depressing how common that is.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/09/20/these-are-the-highest-paid-public-employees-in-every-state/
Holy fuck. Almost every state. Red state or blue state, doesn't matter. Almost always the football coaches. Meanwhile, the person running the booth at the DMV takes home what, $20 an hour maybe?
Haha, about twenty years ago, I was working at a Honda dealership as a lot rat, bringing a used car in for an emissions check; there was a sign at the facility saying they were hiring, for competitive wages. I asked what they were paying, and the tech took a long drag on her cigarette and mumbled, “Minimum.”
So the DMV clerk is probably not even making $20.
I don't know what DMV clerks make, but in general, low-end government jobs pay somewhat better than low-end jobs in other fields. They also usually come with at least decent, if not good, health insurance.
So in that sense, even the worst job at the DMV is better than a lot of other jobs. But they still should be better paid, as should we all, and that certainly makes paying a football coach millions of dollars a year hard to justify. The "football makes lots of money" argument doesn't wash for me. Not even for sports. I'm in Indiana. Basketball coaches should be the top paid sports coach positions if this is solely about making money. But it's still football coaches. I can tell you as a former IU student who also grew up in Bloomington that IU basketball is much bigger than IU football. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure back in the 80s, Bob Knight wasn't the highest-paid public employee despite being one of the most recognized coaches in the country.
But I don't think any sports coach should be the highest paid public employee, so that's sort of moot.
college football at that level is revenue-generating; so it's not really 'taxpayer money' that pays those salaries, but rather the income generated from the football program itself (tickets, advertising, licensing, broadcast fees, boosters, etc.). that income also usually subsidizes the school's sports programs that don't generate a profit--which is, like all of them, other than mens basketball, and in parts of the country, mens ice hockey.
I don't think that justifies the coaches being the highest-paid public employees in the state. You don't have to pay them exorbitantly high salaries to put the revenue generated from football into other sports programs. In most of the states where it isn't football coaches, it's doctors who run the health departments. That makes so much more sense. Who do you want to be the most competent public employee? I would say the one most responsible for stopping people from dying.
Sounds like they should be private employees if it's so profitable. It's odd how we polluted our places of learning with sports programs in the states, by all indications, many sports programs deny their athletes a proper education and a proper salary for their money making activities while the coaches make bank.
Probably couldn’t hack it in the NFL.
After all, the NFL players are proffessionals at wearing tights and chasing other guys who wear tights. They know when the Coach is just torturing them with more laps and cult-like sayings.
Not so much.
https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/2020/11/20/do-college-sports-make-money/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/analysis-who-is-winning-in-the-high-revenue-world-of-college-sports
If it makes you feel better… college football is big business. Schools make shit loads off the broadcast and advertising rights.
(And then shaft the players that attract that dough under some argument if ‘sportsmanship’ or something.)
ROI for college football is just that high.
That is the same justification for excessive CEO pay. It's bullshit in both cases.
until we get the musk vs zuck cage match, there's little by way of spectator entertainment from CEOs though.
I mean, this is a material and provable statement. I won't pretend to have data, but it's entirely possible at least that paying a football coach n dollars results in a return of 1.3n dollars.
I don't know if that's true, and it very much could be good ol' fashioned corruption, but it's not inherently implausible, and if it is true, then the choice is either pay for the coach and use the additional revenue to fund other programs, sports and academic, or don't, and have less money available for those other things.
I get that the optics don't exactly look great, but I wouldn't really agree with telling the women's lacrosse team that they're being disbanded because we decided that paying a lot for a football coach was a bad look and now the total sports budget is down.
Again, I'm not saying this is definitively what's happening; I don't have data or anything. But this is a legitimately plausible explanation for it. Of course, like I said, equally plausible is just plain corruption. I'd genuinely be curious in what the evidence says, to the extent that it exists.
It's less true than you might think.
https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/2020/11/20/do-college-sports-make-money/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/analysis-who-is-winning-in-the-high-revenue-world-of-college-sports
I agree, but that is how the business world operates. It's tunnel vision.
Governments are not businesses, nor should they operate like businesses.
Any businessmen should have to cut all ties to their businesses before they take office.