Unequally Yoked

Brian Goff, a writer at The Sports Economist, muses on one of the reasons we frequently see college athletic personnel "get away with" bad or even illegal behavior until something makes that behavior public. His hook is the way Rutgers men's basketball coach Mike Rice was originally only reprimanded for behavior that, once it showed up in the public view via a video, got him fired.

Goff suggests that such behavior is not necessarily a part of athletic culture and that it's going to happen with any coach. When it does happen, though, universities are poorly equipped to handle it. That's because collegiate athletics is basically a professional entertainment industry that somehow happens to be run by schools, and the two don't always mesh.

After all, think of one of the most common responses given when people wonder why a school's football coach makes more money than the university president (or, in a public university, the governor of the state): It's the free market. Schools are free to offer less money and accept the level of coaching they will receive at that price point, but if they want a top-level coach they have to pay the cost.

On its face, that's a legitimate statement. It's not entirely accurate, since the institution offering the money has it to spend because it gets significant state and federal subsidies. Ginormous U can offer its football coach $6 million because the athletic revenue stream can be used solely for athletics. And it can be used solely for athletics because the academic revenue stream is significantly buttressed by student financial aid, in addition to private donations. The private donations are none of our business unless we're the donors, but the state and federal subsidies come from some of the money we'll be giving to Uncle next Monday and so they are our business.

Even with that caveat, the statement is still true that coaches' salaries are what the market will bear. And that market, with billion-dollar TV contracts and endorsement deals and whatever else an agent can dream up to provide cream to skim, dwarfs the market that exists in the rest of the university. Which means that even though the university president tops a coach on the organizational chart, he or she is the coach's subordinate when it comes to economic power. So until the president or other authority has some extra power in hand matters such as Rice's boorish behavior will be addressed only weakly, if at all. Thus, behavior that earned a suspension brought about a firing only once it was known outside the university community and the power levels were equalized by an expression of public opinion.

Goff doesn't offer solutions -- he's an economist and I imagine he realizes that the amount of money involved in the system makes really workable solutions extremely difficult -- but he points out that for the arrangement under which collegiate athletics operates today, the clumsy handling of the Rice matter is not a bug. It's a feature.