he Chronicle of Higher Education
Date: March 28, 1997
Section: Athletics
Page: A49
The study of Division I-A institutions shows a marked
disparity between top coaches and the rest of academe
By Jim Naughton
Employees of a typical Division I-A athletics department earn a total of at least $3.24-million, according to a confidential survey of 87 universities that has been conducted annually for the past 10 years by the men's-athletics director at the University of Texas at Austin.
According to the most recent survey, a copy of which was obtained by The Chronicle, men's-basketball coaches were the highest-paid individuals in college sports in 1996-97, with median compensation of $290,000. The figure for football coaches was $268,000, and for athletics directors, $158,200.
Thirteen men's-basketball coaches and 12 football coaches received $500,000 or more. In addition to salary, compensation packages often include the use of automobiles, tickets to athletics events, and income from endorsements and television and radio appearances. The figures do not include income that coaches receive directly from booster groups or businesses without university involvement.
In his report on the survey, DeLoss Dodds of Texas presents a list of participating institutions, followed by blind lists of the salaries and compensation packages paid by the institutions to each of 70 athletics-department employees, including administrators, counselors, coaches, and support-staff members. Mr. Dodds also calculates a maximum, minimum, median, and average for each position, and provides a count of the institutions that supplied data for each position.
The Chronicle calculated compensation expenditures for a typical athletics program by adding the median expenditure for positions maintained by a majority of the 87 institutions.
According to these figures:
* In 1996-97, the median personnel expenditure for men's athletics was more than $1.9-million.
* The median personnel expenditure for women's sports was $431,282, less than half of what was spent on football alone ($890,330).
* The median personnel expenditure on administrative positions that supported both men's and women's sports was more than $844,000, and included compensation for 14 people.
The majority of universities in the survey reported expenditures on 14 sports, eight for men and six for women. Many also sponsor additional varsity teams. Moreover, some institutions did not report total compensation for their highest-paid personnel, and none reported salaries for the staff of their athletics facilities or for personnel employed only for specific events. As a result, the figure of $3.24-million is almost certainly low.
Mr. Dodds said the survey was "an athletic directors' thing," designed to learn more about the athletics marketplace. "There's nothing more embarrassing than to go out into the marketplace to get somebody and have no idea what they are worth," he said. "If you bid too low, you lose them, and if you bid too high, you set a new standard."
Mr. Dodds sends his survey to members of the Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big Twelve, Pacific-10, Southeastern, and Western Athletic football conferences; half of the 12 institutions in Conference USA; the Universities of Notre Dame, Massachusetts at Amherst, and Southwestern Louisiana; East Carolina and Utah State Universities; and the U.S. Military and Naval Academies.
Among institutions with prominent football programs, only Brigham Young, Pennsylvania State, and Stanford Universities do not participate.
"It is most useful in helping you understand the norms at like institutions," said Deborah A. Yow, athletics director at the University of Maryland at College Park.
The existence of detailed salary information, available only to employers, raises ethical and legal questions in any industry, said John C. Weistart, a professor of law at Duke University, who has written on antitrust law and college athletics. "Any list that was too specific could have the effect of lessening competition," he said. "The limited distribution of the list highlights the antitrust concern. Who needs to know this, and why?"
Mr. Dodds said he was not concerned about antitrust issues. "What the list has done is raise salaries," he said. "What apparently happens is that an athletic director will take it to his president and say, 'Here's what the marketplace is. We've got to get in the boat.'"
However, he acknowledged the bifurcated nature of the marketplace in college sports, describing his survey as most useful in hiring coaches for teams that do not produce revenue. "For football and basketball, you know what the market is," he said. "It's whatever it takes to get the person."
The survey presents both bad news and good news for proponents of gender equity. Personnel expenditures for women's sports are only 22 per cent of those for men's sports, and much of the median $844,000 administrative expenditure supports men's programs. Yet on some levels, women's coaches have made progress.
Though the median for women's-basketball coaches is only one-third that for men's coaches, women's-basketball coaches are the third-best-compensated group in the survey, with a median package of $98,400.
Senior administrators for women's programs, with a median package of $76,000, earn slightly less than senior associate athletics directors.
The median salary for a softball coach is 56 per cent of that for a baseball coach. But in soccer, swimming, and tennis, the median salaries for women's coach are at least 92 per of those for men's coaches.
Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation, said the survey depresses women's coaches' salaries by freezing in place a discriminatory structure.
"There are two pools," she said. "The coaches of men's sports, who are highly paid, and lower-paid women."
But Andy Geiger, athletics director at the Ohio State University, said that was not the case. "Salaries are market driven," he argued. "There is nothing that says that the field-hockey coach should make what the head football coach makes. We pay our women's-volleyball coach more than our men's-volleyball coach because in our area, there is a stronger market for women's volleyball."
The survey also makes it possible to compare athletic salaries to those of others in academe.
According to a 1996-97 survey conducted by the College and University Personnel Association, the $115,012 median salary for deans of arts and sciences at institutions that grant doctoral degrees was more than $15,000 below the median salary of athletics directors in Mr. Dodds's survey.
The 1996-97 CUPA survey of faculty salaries has not yet been released. However, according to last year's figures, the average full professor at a public institution earned $60,587, lower than the average salary of six out of nine assistant football coaches in Mr. Dodds's survey. The average associate professor at such an institution earned $47,467, roughly the same as the average sports-information director, and the average assistant professor earned $39,148, about $1,100 less than the average ticket manager.
Faculty salaries have risen about 3 per cent in each of the past two years.