Kansas and Turner Gill and justifying $2 million a year
There are reasons Kansas is paying Turner Gill $2 million a year to be its football coach. Some may be legitimate. None are backed by common sense.
Headed by Lew Perkins, ku's athletic department quintupled Gill's salary at Buffalo because it can, and also so it can brag about it.
There is little doubt that Gill -- who was reportedly making $400,000 at Buffalo -- would've jumped at the Kansas job for $1.5 million or less and given the exact same effort with the exact same enthusiasm. Instead, he gets an extra half-million or more -- that's real money in Lawrence -- so Perkins and ku can sit at the big boy table.
Perkins essentially walked into the car dealership, fell in love with a $50,000 Benz* and told the salesman, "Would you take $75,000 instead?"
The crazy part is that money in college sports runs in such illogical ways that this might actually be a smart move.
"There's no other market quite like college athletics," says Dan Fulks, director of the accounting program at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., and author of a 114-page NCAA report on Division I revenues and expenditures. "This doesn't even happen in pro sports."
Money flies in pro sports, of course, but in ways that are much more intuitive. Bidding wars are more logical. Nobody pays a coach or player extra money just for show.
But Fulks points to a sort of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses culture gone crazy in college sports, where commitment is measured by the millions of dollars, both in facilities construction and coaches' salaries.
Gill, who arrives with a 20-30 record coaching in the MAC, will cash a bigger paycheck than Bo Pelini, coach of the Big 12 North champion Cornhuskers. He makes more than Bill Snyder, Gary Patterson, Jim Leavitt, Chip Kelly, and a host of others who've won conference championships and coached in BCS bowls.
Kansas is paying Gill $2 million a year not because he's worth it -- he's not ... at least not yet -- but because it gives the school and its new coach a certain cache in places that matter.
It is an expensive but effective way of telling boosters and -- much more importantly -- recruits that Kansas is serious about football. The hope is that the extra half-million or so brings a return with more donations and better recruits attracted to a program perceived to be more serious based largely upon the head coach's salary.
"It's partly a matter of ego, and it's also partly a matter of recruiting," Fulks says. "Those two things combined are what drives an awful lot of spending. Texas is paying Mack Brown $5 million a year because supposedly is says something to recruits that, 'We're really committed to the sport.' That's what ku is doing."
This isn't particularly new, of course. Big money has driven college sports for years, driving a divide between academics and athletics at many schools. Texas' faculty council, for instance, this week deemed Brown's salary "unseemly and inappropriate."
But what is becoming more and more obvious is that schools' athletic departments are judging and judged as much on their most visible price tags as anything else. It's a status symbol, like a Hummer or Malibu beach house, except the benefit is either perceived or intangible.
Where else does this exist in sports, or life?
When the Chiefs hired Todd Haley and Scott Pioli, they paid him the lowest amount possible to still get the guys they wanted. Same thing with the Royals and Dayton Moore and Trey Hillman. Ditto for every other pro team out there, and the company you work for, and, for that matter, YOU when you shop online or look at buying a house or any other major purchase.
If paying Gill an extra half-million somehow boosts the football program's image and strength, it's worthwhile. Applications and donations typically jump after athletic success, perhaps most famously with Northwestern after its 1996 Rose Bowl run and Boston College after the Doug Flutie years.
Viewed through that lens, this is one giant stimulus package for both Gill's family and the entire athletic department. A move that looks at first like burning money has the chance to be a smart investment.
"The truth is if you put a cap of $250,000 per year on it, guys would still be lined around the block for these jobs," Fulks says. "(But) with the things you can't measure, if (Gill) wins and it brings in more applications and gives you better diversity and higher ACT or SAT scores to your student body, what's that worth to you?
"And if he's successful enough to move you from the Outback Bowl or whatever to a BCS bowl, then, yeah, he makes it up in a year."
Won't be long until Bill Self needs a raise, too.
Submitted by Sam Mellinger on December 16, 2009 - 10:16am.
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