Rise in coaches salaries may be a question, but the answer is not in Congress

Is Congressional oversight the only way to bring soaring college coaching salaries under control? We don't think so.

At first blush it seems like a bad idea whose time has come.

Salaries at the highest level of college football and basketball have grown to levels none of us could have ever anticipated. Not only are top head football coaches making in the range of $7-9 million a year, but the highly-coveted coordinators are now making $2 million plus.

There are two things that are contributing to this explosion of salaries:

1--There is simply more money being poured into college football than ever before. The SEC announced last week that its 14 members shared a record $651 million in revenue for the 2018-19 fiscal year. That averages out to $44.6 million per school. Not a bad way to start your yearly budgeting process.

Consider that just six years ago, fiscal year 2013-2014, the SEC’s shared revenue was $20.9 million per school. So that’s a jump of almost $24 million per school in a relatively short amount of time.

What happened? The SEC Network and the College Football Playoff happened.

And that number is only going to go up when the SEC cuts a new deal for its Game of the Week TV package, which is owned by CBS through the 2023 season. CBS is currently paying $55 per year, which represents the biggest bargain in sports programming. The new deal, regardless of who gets it, will certainly go north of $300 million per year.

And by the way, the SEC’s current numbers are second to the Big Ten, which distributed $759 million in fiscal 2018-19. That translates to $54 million per school.

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2—So what does all of this mean? It means that if you’re a director of athletics, you can’t let a highly-valued coach walk away simply because of money. No school in the Power Five can sit down and negotiate with the agent of a coach and claim poverty. You can’t claim you don’t have the money to pay your head football coach $7 to $9 million a year because the Jimmy Sextons of the world know damned well you have the money.

And if you don’t want to pay it just out of principle, there is another school with a 100,000-seat stadium that is willing to pay it.

The schools can’t help themselves. Their deep-pocketed alumni want to win and if you don’t win they quit writing the checks. And they also start firing athletics directors.

So it’s an issue. Not going to deny it. It’s not a healthy look when a head football coach is making $9 million and the players are still fighting for the scraps they can get from the free market if the Name, Image, and Likeness legislation finally comes to pass.

But dear friends, the answer to this dilemma is not going to be found in the Congress of the United States.

Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com reported last week that there is a bill to create the Congressional Advisory Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics (CACIA) “to investigate the relationship between institutions of higher education and intercollegiate athletics programs.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to sleep better knowing that the CACIA is on the job.

Now a lot of people I respect, like Dr. David Ridpath, a professor of Sports Management at Ohio University, are behind this movement because they feel government intervention, in the form of an anti-trust exemption for college athletics, is the only way to bring the spending under control. The schools cannot and will not do it on their own. The competitive pressures are just too great.

I understand and respect their point of view.

But there is a larger issue at stake here and it is this:

Congress, no matter how well-intentioned, has no more business telling public institutions how much they should pay football coaches than they have telling schools how much they should pay the head of the Chemistry department. Each university, its president and presiding body, determine what its commitment is going to be for each department. And that includes athletics.

At the University of Georgia, President Jere Morehead, the Board of Regents, and the Athletics Board make these decisions. Same for Alabama. Same for Florida. Same for every other school.

Now, could the schools do a better job of negotiating deals with coaches and their agents? You bet they could.

Could the schools not sign deals with ridiculous buyout clauses? No doubt.

Maybe that’s where the solution begins. It's called self-restraint.

But now that some schools have made a mess of things, don’t ask Congress to bail you out. Fix your own mess.