Wages and Justice

A number of themes arise from the following piece from USA Today: the goofiness of how much coaches earn (Duke coach 11 million!) and compmensation for players (who can be seen as employees in some cases), tied to laborers in the USA who are not paid decent wages for minimum wage… it goes on…

Do you think NCAA income-generating sports should be paid more? 

Do you think education and sports should be separated?

USA Today

LOS ANGELES – Moments after UCLA won the Pacific-12 Conference men’s basketball tournament in March, coach Steve Alford and his players climbed a ladder, cut down the nets and took a piece of the nylon string as part of their respective, and very different, rewards.

The players got hats and T-shirts. Alford got a hat and a T-shirt — and notched $40,000 in bonuses. It added to a lucrative year for the new coach — $2.6 million in annual compensation from UCLA, along with an $845,000 signing bonus he received last spring to cover his buyout and taxes when he left the University of New Mexico.

Alford’s players, by contrast, attend UCLA on a scholarship that pays for tuition, room and board, but fails to cover more than $4,000 per year in living and other expenses, according to the school’s most recent financial report to the NCAA.

The financial divide between Alford and his players reflects a national trend: College scholarship athletes face thousands in out-of-pocket costs while coaches’ salaries — and revenue from college sports — continue to rise dramatically, a USA TODAY Sports analysis shows. The players in this year’s Final Four attend schools where the gap between their scholarships and the total cost of attendance ranges from about $2,300 to $5,400 per year, according to the schools’ financial reports. Yet the coaches — Kentucky’s John Calipari, Florida’s Billy Donovan, Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan and Connecticut’s Kevin Ollie — are collecting an average of $3.1 million from their schools for this season.

The same four coaches have racked up a combined total of $850,000 in additional bonuses this year, enough money to cover a $4,000 cost-of-attendance gap for 212 scholarship athletes.

Meanwhile, college athletes, who compete as amateurs and cannot be paid under NCAA rules, helped Division I schools generate nearly $11 billion in revenue in 2012-13, research by USA TODAY Sports shows, with more than $4.8 billion going to 55 schools in the six power college conferences (Big Ten, Pac-12, Southeastern, Big 12, ACC and Big East). Those schools comprised 16% of the Division I membership but claimed 45% of the revenue, the analysis shows.