College football is huge business
It generates enormous money for the universities. Forbes magazine listed the most valuable teams based on enterprise value, revenues, and profits. Typically, revenues come from ticket sales, alumni donations tied to club seats, corporate sponsorship, licensing, and television distribution rights. I am not convinced on how they calculated profits, so I only show revenues.
The top 10 teams generated revenues of $742 million in 2011
The University of Texas was the clear leader with $96 million in revenues; they received corporate sponsorship from Coca-cola, Gatorade, and have their own cable channel in conjunction with Disney’s ESPN called the Longhorn Network.
College football is more profitable than Microsoft or Google
Forbes estimated the profits of each team in the same survey. For the top 20 teams, the average profitability was about 63%, which means that 63 cents out of every dollar was net profit. Crazy. To me, this seemed outlandishly high. After all, college football cannot be 3x more profitable than Microsoft (MSFT net margins of 21%), or can it?
Forbes does great work, but I can only assume that they did not factor in all the fixed costs that might be shared by the university (e.g., depreciation of the stadiums, training facilities, etc). As an alumnus of one of these top 20 revenue-generating football teams, it makes me pause to think that the university is largely funded by the football team.
Should college athletes be paid?
There has been a long-running debate among sports lovers on whether college athletes should be paid. Currently, they are not compensated for playing sports (other than their year-to-year scholarships). I am not a huge sports fans, but there is not shortage of polemics on this topic; you can find well-argued points supporting both sides of the debate: New York Times, Sports Illustrated, ESPN.
Economists would say something needs to change
Whatever the solution, some changes are needed. It is no surprise that the richest football teams (e.g., Penn State, Alabama, Texas, Southern California, Auburn, Georgia, Ohio, Florida etc) also had football-related scandals recently. You cannot have an multi-billion dollar industry where the main assets are people who cannot be officially paid. It is a powder keg waiting to explode. Eventually, there will be too much at stake and people will rationalize cheating. We are not setting up people for success.
Coaches are paid
Unlike the players, coaches can be paid. USA Today put together this database of football head coach salaries. As a bit of a libertarian, people should be paid for their work and it is a free market for labor. If you can get this kind of pay, good for you. Even so, take a look at these numbers and you will find them a bit surprising, even by American executive pay standards.
Coach pay is not equal
Nor should it be. I believe that good coaches make a difference, just like good leaders make a different in organizations. Good ones should be paid more. Here is the graph that shows how football head coach salaries drop off by 50% around the 20th team, then drops off another 50% by the 60th team. The pauper in this list of salaries is for the head coach of Louisiana-Monroe. Don’t feel sorry for him though, $250K is not bad.
Post script: How Can a New College Football Coach Avoid Getting Fired, Freakonomics