[doug]

There is much discussion in this thread regarding the apparently irresistible "need" to pay $5 m. annual salaries for head football coaches and $1 m.+ salaries to top assistants. How many on this board believe this is a necessary and inevitable recognition of reality? I, for one, believe it is a complete outrage. I enjoy Stanford football and all Stanford athletics, but I would rather Stanford drop down to the Ivy or D-III model than have its football coach make 5-8x's the salary of the University president. Joe Paterno was a cautionary tale in this regard (and I can make the case that Paterno's ethics aligned better in most respects with the academic mission of a university than most D-I football coaches' ethics do). I have had this disagreement with a number of people whose usual response is that $5 m. is simply the price established by "the market" for a top coach, as if that insulates this unacceptable practice from my challenging the ethics of it. To me, this response is simply capitulating to the inevitable degradation of fundamental and important standards that results from our acceptance as a society of the increasing professionalization of sport which we have allowed/enabled. I don't accept that a university, much less a great university, should be considered bound to engage in such a "market" for an endeavor so peripheral to its core academic mission. 

[doug]

There is much discussion in this thread regarding the apparently irresistible "need" to pay $5 m. annual salaries for head football coaches and $1 m.+ salaries to top assistants. How many on this board believe this is a necessary and inevitable recognition of reality? I, for one, believe it is a complete outrage. I enjoy Stanford football and all Stanford athletics, but I would rather Stanford drop down to the Ivy or D-III model than have its football coach make 5-8x's the salary of the University president. Joe Paterno was a cautionary tale in this regard (and I can make the case that Paterno's ethics aligned better in most respects with the academic mission of a university than most D-I football coaches' ethics do). I have had this disagreement with a number of people whose usual response is that $5 m. is simply the price established by "the market" for a top coach, as if that insulates this unacceptable practice from my challenging the ethics of it. To me, this response is simply capitulating to the inevitable degradation of fundamental and important standards that results from our acceptance as a society of the increasing professionalization of sport which we have allowed/enabled. I don't accept that a university, much less a great university, should be considered bound to engage in such a "market" for an endeavor so peripheral to its core academic mission.