… the idiots running university sports.
[An NCAA report shows] no connection between coaches’ salaries and winning. “The only category of spending that has a statistically significant effect on performance,” the authors say, “is ‘team expenditures’ .” — recruiting, equipment and other “game-day expenses.”
Co-author Jonathan Orszag, an economist who once served on President Clinton’s National Economic Council and as assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, says there are instances in which big salaries for coaches prove to be sound investments. But “on aggregate,” he says, that’s not the case.
“There’s a lot of pressure on university presidents to hire an expensive coach,” says Orszag, whose brother Peter is the new White House budget director, “but the evidence suggests that spending more on coaches does not bring the benefit to the university that they expect.”
May 7th, 2009 at 8:46AM
One reason it doesn’t impress, of course, is that the aggregate winning percentage of coaches is going to be .500 no matter what they all get paid.
But there are distinctions to be drawn. When the now-unbelievably-overpaid John Calipari was at UMass, he lifted the program to a level of [athletic] success not seen before or since. He then left for a bigger paycheck, and UMass promoted a former assistant to head coach, with a big raise. At that point, Calipari had earned his money; his successor had not — he’d done okay as an assistant, presumably, and he was taking on new responsibilities, but no one was bidding for his services.
In other words: There’s a difference between paying a coach because he’s good at it, and paying a coach because he has the job. UMass may have been right to decline to match Calipari’s offer,but a decision the other way would have been defensible; whereas overpaying Bruiser Flint made no sense.