See if you can connect these dots. The University of Alabama Geniuses will pay $4 million over the next several years for the privilege of never again seeing Mike Shula wearing a headset on a Crimson Tide sideline. They were willing to pay another $2 million to West Virginia University to buy out the contract of the Mountaineers’ football coach, Rich Rodriguez, and bring him to Tuscaloosa.

Florida, which is paying $2.1 million each season to Urban Meyer, still has an even higher obligation ($2.6 million) in severance to former coach Ron Zook. Colorado’s athletic department actually had to borrow $8 million to help pay off its ousted coaches.

And when the Gators traveled to Jacksonville in October for their annual meeting with Georgia, instead of making the 90-minute bus trip on Saturday morning, they left school a whole day before and spent a chunk of the program’s $1.2 million travel budget at the Marriott Resort and Spa in Sawgrass.

Don’t be too hard on the Gators. At Colorado (among others), it’s a familiar practice for the football team to bag the dorms in favor of five-star hotels even before home games.

The University of Texas recently expanded Memorial Stadium to the tune of $150 million. Not to be outdone, financier T. Boone Pickens wrote a check for $165 million to his favorite charity, the athletics program at Oklahoma State.


Florida State can afford to pay an annual salary of $228,000 to the president of Seminole Booster Inc.—which raised $42 million in 2004 for the university’s athletic programs.

Before the deal fell through, Alabama-Birmingham boosters were going to cover most of the proposed $600,000 for LSU assistant Jimbo Fisher to become their new football coach.

Of course you’re right if you identified having more money than sense as the operative common denominator here.

And you’re not wrong if you answered that the big problem is the obscene deluge of money flowing into major-college football and basketball.

But if you want to get at the source of many of these flows, take a gander at our federal tax code. You may not have realized it, but we taxpayers help foot the bills for the oil-sheikh-opulent salary packages and off-campus spa weekends. And we do it even when those luxuries are covered from private donations.

It’s because the NCAA, which signs billion-dollar contracts that allow TV networks to broadcast its sports entertainment products, enjoys tax-exempt status. And how can a huge entertainment conglomerate—not to mention the fans who shower money on independent booster organizations in volumes that would inspire Pat Robertson to babble in tongues—get itself a free pass from the IRS?

To hear the NCAA boys explain it, they all merit a break because big-time athletic programs are integrally involved in higher education. You have to give them credit. Not even Jon Stewart could make that up.

Of course, this may come as startling news to the rest of us, who note that defending national champion Texas graduated only 29 percent of its players. Or who remember that, University of Georgia president Michael Adams, defending the academic underperformance of his school’s scholarship jocks, noted, “We still have to compete in the Southeastern Conference.”

Congressman Bill Thomas, the outgoing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, apparently also found the NCAA’s justifications a mite hard to swallow. “Why,” he wrote in a letter to the organization during the fall, “should the federal government subsidize the athletic activities of educational institutions when that subsidy is being used to help pay for escalating coaches’ salaries, costly chartered travel and state-of-the-art athletic facilities?”

And by the way, Thomas wanted to know, “What actions has the NCAA taken to retain a clear line of demarcation between major college sports and professional sports?”

Surely the University of Michigan, which is spending $226 million to add 3,200 luxury seats and 83 suites to its 107,501-seat stadium, isn’t drawing that line. Nor is Oklahoma State, which imposes a $2,500 “annual donation” for the right to buy tickets for the best seats. As columnist George Will observed, “These may be sound commercial decisions, but why should this commerce be tax-exempt?”

Excellent question. The new Democratic-controlled House should keep asking it, and finally close this ridiculous loophole.

No, this one action will not magically restore integrity to big-time college sports. But it would dry up many of the channels of free money now flowing into bloated salary packages, spa stays and cherry-paneled locker rooms.

If T. Boone Pickens needed to reduce his tax liability, he could still give his $165 million to some area of the university—perhaps a library expansion or scholarship fund—that actually relates to education. And maybe the rest of us, starting with the NCAA, could stop pretending that big-time football and basketball are something besides a business.