![]() ![]() It's about generating bucks to pay lordly sums to coaches, about building crème de la crème facilities to entice teenage recruits. More than ever before, the college game is about entertainment and pro-type franchises. This isn't your father's college football anymore. The six Bowl Championship Series conferences - the SEC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-10, ACC and Big East - generated nearly $900 million in revenues (from all sports) in the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2008, according to their most recently filed federal tax documents. These are the places that billion-dollar television deals (including ESPN's $2.25 billion, 15-year contract), cavernous campus stadiums and no-holds-barred commercialism call home. Nothing apparently can touch this bigger-is-better business in which head coaches enjoy rock star status and pull down CEO-esque salaries that routinely dwarf the compensation packages of university presidents. Welcome to the penthouses of collegiate football, where for decades doomsday scenarios and reform movements from academic leaders have been coming to die. The more Brown and other coaches make, the more Saban will make. And in fact, the University of Alabama saw fit this past September to make sure Saban's salary can at least stay near the top of the college ranks in the future when it included a "market rate review" clause in his contract that will adjust his pay in 2015 to the higher of two averages - the three highest-paid coaches in the Southeastern Conference or the five highest-paid coaches in all of NCAA football. It is unseemly and inappropriate, they might say, that their man, one of the top coaches in the top college football conference in the land, doesn't make as much as Brown does. Some Saban boosters, as it happens, might use the same adjectives to describe Brown's salary, although for different reasons. Perhaps tellingly, there weren't enough faculty members at the meeting to make a quorum, so their resolution doesn't even qualify as an official on-the-record condemnation. So earlier this week, a University of Texas faculty group passed a resolution that calls Brown's deal "unseemly and inappropriate." Not that it means much. $5 million a year through the 2016 season. Alabama's Nick Saban gets only $4.7 million annually. That gives Brown at least one pregame edge over his coaching opponent in the title game. Shortly after he guided the team into one of two berths in next month's Citi BCS National Championship Game, they turned him into the college game's first $5 million-per-year man. The university system regents didn't just tweak Brown's $3 million-a-year salary recently. ![]() You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browserĪlabama Crimson Tide, Arkansas Razorbacks, Auburn Tigers, Florida Gators, Georgia Bulldogs, Kentucky Wildcats, LSU Tigers, Mississippi Rebels, Mississippi State Bulldogs, South Carolina Gamecocks, Tennessee Volunteers, Texas Longhorns, Vanderbilt CommodoresĮven some people in Texas, famous for its bigger-is-better way of life, are shaking their heads in sticker shock from the size of Longhorns football coach Mack Brown's new contract.
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