Universities need to gain control of overpaid football coaches

Frank Beamer, the head coach at Virginia Tech, this week signed a new contract with the school. The contract calls for a salary of more than $2 million per year for seven years with a three-year university option to follow.

There are additional monies if the team appears in postseason bowl games. The higher rated the bowl (read that as the more money paid out), the more he and his assistants will receive.

Beamer becomes the 11th Division IA football coach to pass the million mark in salary. Just how much he and others earn through apparel and shoe contracts, television shows, endorsements, and personal appearances is not known.

Those dollars are generated “outside” the universities and go well into the millions.

No one faults Beamer and others for going after what the market will bear, but it is time the universities took a long look at how such deals can be justified with the ever tightening university budgets overall.

The first argument supporting these salaries, repeated ad nauseam, is that big time football programs support everything else that goes on at the university, or the universe for that matter. Not true say John Lombardi, chancellor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

He wrote in January in Inside Higher Ed, “Maybe five [Division IA football programs] in the country make money (if you could get them to report their income and expenses honestly and fully). The other 112 or so lose money; some lose a great deal of money.”

Why? Because the money gets pumped back into the programs for Taj Mahal stadiums, ostentatious weight rooms, coaches salaries (there are staffs of 20 and up at the big schools), travel and coaching staff buildings that are enormous and dedicated to football only.

The race in coaches contracts started with the basketball coaches a couple decades ago. Once they passed the million mark, the football coaches wanted in.

That race has created a vicious circle: Coaches want more and better everything related to the football programs so they can recruit the best players so they can win and spend more money.

Such spending pulls everyone along, big program or not. Every coach uses the highest salaries to argue they are not paid enough. Every coach says, “See what they have. How can we compete?”

The arrogance of the power house schools grows, mostly from the head coach’s office out. The Miami Hurricanes fired an assistant coach recently and head coach Larry Coker said, “This is a private, in-house matter, and I will have no further comment.”

That is the general response to all questions that attempt to delve into the workings of university football programs that are now big businesses that benefit head coaches more than anyone.

The media exalts a coach because he (always “he”) has won X number of games, turns him into a “hero” so we’ll pay attention and sells the hero to advertisers to make money.

The coach starts believing the circus act, becomes part of it and wants more money.

It’s time universities became the ring masters of this circus.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and ABC sportscaster.