Amateur Hour

  • A lineman is a terrible thing to waste.Pete Carroll, head coach, USC: $4,400,000
  • Charlie Weis, Notre Dame: $4,200,000
  • Nick Saban, Alabama: $3,900,000
  • Bob Stoops, Oklahoma: $3,800,000

  • Les Miles, LSU: $3,800,000
  • Jim Tressel, Ohio State: $3,500,000
  • Urban Meyer, Florida: $3,400,000
  • Kirk Ferentz, Iowa: $3,030,000
  • Mack Brown, Texas: $2,910,000
  • Bobby Petrino, Arkansas: $2,900,000
2009 college football coach salaries [Orlando Sentinel]
24 Comments

When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me about these wonderful US America schools where knowledge was dished out to smart Asian (okay, Korean) kids. Of course, when I watched TV sports, namely New Years Football Bowl games there were these schools I never heard of. Yale, MIT, Princeton, CalTech or Hahvahd were never at these bowl games instead it was schools from the South and Midwest.

I used to wonder why some schools were known for their knowledge vs sports in US America. Now, I understand.

@ManchuCandidate: For what it’s worth – and I am never one to toot the PSU horn – Joe Paterno earned “only” half a mil up until 06 when he signed a three year extension worth a little over a million. Given that he’s north of 80 and the winningest coach in US America college sports, I’d say that is fairly decent. Plus he maintains a pretty high rate of graduation among his players.

These big-time football programs will all tell you that they are self-supporting in the sense of bringing in enough ticket and TV advertising revenue to pay for the coaching staff and scholarships. Same for the top basketball programs. I don’t know if that’s true or not, or whether, for example, football revenue is used to support sports that don’t bring in much revenue like crew or water polo.

@Dodgerblue:
I dunno. We’ve had the same argument in Canada City for at least 3-4 decades, but no university outside of a couple will issue athletic scholarships. Seems to me that the rest of the skule outside of sports suffers.

It’s usually the same brand of sports guys (retrocon, never really went to skules of highar larning) who want similar style US America NCAA sports. Probably why we don’t produce big time b-ball or football stars, but I’d rather take more edumakated kids.

@ManchuCandidate: When I’m in charge, there won’t be athletic scholarships.

@Dodgerblue: It’s a lie. My college had no FB team. We whined about it all the damned time. For some reason, even at 28s year old, I was the one who was dared to ask, “Prof [redacted], is it true one of the the professors here used to teach in the nude?” (Yes, it was true, but he taught that class out of his home, attendance was not mandatory, and some students’ parents came to the lectures. He felt we were not comfortable with our own bodies, so he held these special classes.)

One day I was dared to ask the same professor why we didn’t have a football team. I thought the professor’s head was going to asplode. He said:

Do you have any idea, any inkling of an idea how much your tuition would go up if we had a football team? No, no, you don’t. Do you know why we end the spring semester earlier than surrounding colleges and start the fall semester later? It’s so you guys can get the jump on other schools when it comes to summer jobs at the shore and so you can work longer. Do you even know why this college in the Pine Barrens was started by [dirty old hippies] from Yale and Brown and other fancy places? We were, and still are, dedicated to the idea that working-class kids in South Jersey deserve a good liberal arts education, too. Have you noticed that our bookstore carries more used books than new? We choose our texts based on how much they are going to cost you. We think about you all the time, and that is why you don’t have a football team.

When they dared me to ask him if rumors that he sat naked in the sauna were true, I was like, “Hell, no!”

@Dodgerblue: When I am prime minister the only sports scholarships will be for rigid-blade sword fighting – team and single. Now that would be a worthy spectacle to sate the savage, boiling hormones of college kids.

@Dodgerblue: I think that even you who bleeds Bruin blue would have to give The Tree some credit for managing to have good athletics without compromising academic standards. They may not be a football or men’s basketball powerhouse year after year, but when you look at how well all their other teams and sports do, especially on the women’s side, it’s pretty impressive how almost every year year LSJU wins the NCAA award for best academics among its sports teams and best all-around performance on the different sports. Most of the schools that have the powerhouse football or men’s basketball teams are not spreading the love and money to the other sports. Stanford is one of the few exceptions.

The finest business writing, as usual, is found in the sports pages. Wonderful analysis of how savage ticket pricing anomalies caused, in part, by Wall Street corruption is helping to alienate later generations of kids who will never join the ranks of lifelong sports fans.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=091005yankeestickets

Non-Sport TJ: Props to Chief Justice George of the California Supreme Court for calling things in the state as they are and ragging on the referendum process. Among other things, he says, “Chickens gained valuable rights in California on the same day that gay men and lesbians lost them.”

SanFranLefty: That quote is ten different kinds of awesome.

(If memory serves, horse slaughtering was on the ballot the same day as initiatives relating to immigration and the marrying of the gays. Horsies won. Which is nice and everything, notwithstanding the fact that real live human beings lost.)

But also, I have no idea why they still hand out the Director’s Cup every year. It just goes to Stanford every damned time (at least for the I-A types).

Noted: ManchuCandidate brings up the fact that Canada City schools don’t really have a scholarship-driven athletic system. I’m sure that the McGill Fighting Whoevers could rack up a few wins if they put their minds to it, though. (Also notable: Pa Bureau did a year up at McGill on a post-MD fellowship. It’s true!)

But — there is an underbelly of youth Sport up there. Ladies and gentlemen… junior hockey. You basically trade honest-to-God high school for full-scale, bascially full-time professional hockey for 16 year olds. This makes the NCAA look like a sane alternative.

@SanFranLefty: Stanford has, by far, the best graduation rate for “student-athletes” in the Pac 10. Arizona, typically, is the worst (party on!). When I was an undergrad at UCLA, you knew you had signed up for a “mick” when you walked in and saw Henry Bibby.

Do you know how the schools rate in supporting other sports from football/basketball revenue?

@chicago bureau:
Not really. There is no pretense of “higher” larning or diverting resources from edumakashun in Canadian Juniors hockey. It’s all profit driven, but the kids are supposed to “go” to high skule.

College and university are usually the next course for the most academically gifted (few and far between admittedly) who are undrafted.

FYI, it’s the McGill Redmen… it’s not a Wash Redskins kind of name (skule colors are red/white.)

So let’s see….The Nojos beat the DodgerBlues, and the fricken Beavers of Corvallis brought down The Tree (to use DB’s phrase). Longhorns are making me nervous.

And snow caused a baseball game to be canceled? The season is officially too long.

@SanFranLefty: Rewind the tape. DB has claimed that in his parlance The Tree is not The Farm? Who’s The Tree?

@Dodgerblue: Don’t make me search the comments (can we get a search feature here, God?), cuz I *know* one day you called someone else The Trees and told me is wasn’t The Farm. Or maybe the Xanax was working. But, by Gawd, I will search each and every post for the past, um, three weeks, if I have to.

UT-CU game is giving me heart palpitations. Hook ‘EM!

@JNOV: Hey, Gawd. Never mind. Google works.

Which is why the Holy Geek hasn’t bothered with an in-site search function yet. Sooner or later. Maybe.

@JNOV: You are obviously younger than I because you have a functioning memory.

@nojo: A “recent comments” list thats more than ten comments long would be cool, just saying.

@redmanlaw: I’m slowly studying iPhone programming in my spare time, with a thought to creating a Stinque App as a demo project.

Of course, that’s the Hard Way — more typically, sites just add a browser-detector and shunt cells to minimalized pages. And I may do that, too. But it’s not as fun.

@Promnight: Ten’s my limit for the sidebar (which you’ll recall was originally five at CP), but I guess I could add a comment-only page at some point. I’d also like to add a Commenter Stalker some day, but I keep hoping somebody else programs a WordPress plug-in before I get around to it.

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