Do you know how often UD has been lectured on the subject of the athletic marketplace? “We can’t control the marketplace,” says David Boren, president of the University of Oklahoma. We just can’t! We can’t control the market! Whatever we have to pay, we have to pay!
Absolutely everyone thinks that way.
So now you say – under pressure of Penn State – you just say, you just state it like oh obviously – they shouldn’t give coaches multimillion-dollar contracts.
Tell me in what way that’s not a cheap throwaway line.
July 17th, 2012 at 6:57AM
speaking of the Invisible Hand that shall not be questioned:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2012/jul/17/higher-education-bubble/
July 17th, 2012 at 1:46PM
Up until about 50 years ago, a principal concern about college sports was the influence of coaches; a key part of the Ivy League project, initially, was directed there. Then in the ’60s there was a reversal, and everything was turned over to the coaches (a big part of why the Ivy reforms didn’t take). It seems to me that we’re now seeing the return of this issue. Penn State is almost epiphenomenal – the real focus is that coaches now command amazing salaries. And this is in fact a market effect:
1) Outstanding coaches do make a difference
2) Success (in football and basketball) brings in a lot of money
3) The players aren’t getting any of it (nor should they, in my view), but the guys who recruit them …
Bear in mind that all college sports, in aggregate, lost money. The problem here is that we’ve created a winner-take-all system in which mechanisms to socialize the costs have been systematically undermined. And one of those mechanisms was in fact the NCAA, which got run over by the football powers.
July 17th, 2012 at 2:23PM
Mr Punch: The NCAA IS the football powers. As is the Knight Commission. The sport has been taken over by moguls (variants of Phil Knight and T. Boone), coaches whose salaries and power have corrupted them and degraded the universities that hired them, and of course corporate interests (advertising, alcohol, etc.). To watch this sick reality presented as wholesome has been, for me, quite amazing. Paterno just gives the whole thing a focus. A statue.