MustangSTATS wrote:Both get paid based on market rates. You can have an article arguing that coach pay for football in college has gotten out of hand or academic cost in general are getting out of control, but this is a poor way to do it. Both top research professors and coaches are largely tied to performance (grants and wins). Also coaches get paid higher, but they also do not have the premium of job insurance that professors do, not to say this entirely explains the pay trade off. But more importantly at that high end of pay, what you get is what you bring in. Win a noble prize and don't bring in grant money, have fun with base salary. Win a championship and have two consecutive losing seasons after that, there is the door.
This is actually a pretty good explanation of what is happening. As a tenured prof. here at SMU (and previously at other major Texas University - read south of us), there are a lot of professors who have issues with the pay of the coaches. However, they forget about tenure, i.e., a coach can be fired for a poor season, but a tenured professor can not. One other factor not mentioned is the fact that coaches are like athletes or actors: the very best get paid a lot, but the average/good starve on their income. A Nobel laureate generally gets paid "reasonably" for decades before getting the award (not to mention the actual value of the award - about $1.4 million), as well as getting paid decades after the award. Other than Paterno, no coach has this sort of security. Finally, $400K for a professor? No one at SMU gets paid that type of salary without administrative (or athletic) responsibilities. In athletics, it is much easier to measure the value of a coach, even though many of the posters here seemingly could do a better job than June (or whomever is the coach).
Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2011 10:36 am
