
A coach is probably the highest-paid public employee in your (US) state - soundsop
http://wagesofwins.com/2013/05/10/a-coach-is-probably-the-highest-paid-public-employee-in-your-state/
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teej
An employee with specialized skills who runs a profit center in an
organization makes the most money? Color me surprised.

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prostoalex
Profit centers, eh?
[http://seattletimes.com/html/collegesports/2010103078_ncaa21...](http://seattletimes.com/html/collegesports/2010103078_ncaa21.html)

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gtCameron
Yes, profit centers. Notice how all but one of the coaches on that map coach
Football or Basketball.

Athletic departments as a whole aren't profitable because the ridiculous
amounts of profits earned by basketball and football can't subsidize the
losses incurred by supporting the other sports.

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prostoalex
Does this profit calculation include or exclude the cost (or bond interest
payments) of building up a football stadium with supporting facilities?

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ajross
Obviously that's going to be an analysis that has to be done for every
stadium. Certainly in many cases it works out -- the average age of an NCAA
stadium or arena is much higher than a professional venue. These are not the
billion-dollar megaplexes you're probably imagining.

But really, I think the issue here is that you're arguing at cross purposes.
There's a strong argument to be made that the _whole idea_ of the state
running a profit-making sports team through its universities is flawed and
borderline immoral. And I tend to agree.

But that says nothing about the economics of the situation, or the "fairness"
of paying the coaching staff a market wage, or even the fact that these absurd
salaries are, in fact, driven by a very liquid and efficient market.

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prostoalex
Yeah, agree with what you're saying. The "fairness" comes into play as high-
salaried coaches become high-pensioned retirees [1], but other than that NCAA
salaries are not wildly divergent from professional sports salaries, so seem
to be in line with market

[http://budget.universityofcalifornia.edu/files/2011/11/2012-...](http://budget.universityofcalifornia.edu/files/2011/11/2012-13_budget.pdf)

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magic_man
A coach probably brings more revenue into your school than any other employee.

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jofer
Typically, it's only into the athletic department, though. At least at the big
state schools I've been at, money from athletics/merchandizing/etc goes to
athletics and only athletics. Beyond paying for athlete's education, etc, the
money isn't going back into education in any direct way.

However, the coach's salary is typically paid out of the athletic revenue
stream, not directly from state funds, which makes it a bit of a moot point.

(Note: To the best of my knowledge (which isn't much) this holds for Univ. of
TN, Univ. of AL, and Univ. of WI. It's probably different at many other
schools.)

Of course, all that having been said, the popular sports entirely fund all of
the less popular, but still very meaningful athletic programs. There's also a
_lot_ to be said for the secondary effects of having a popular sports team on
the overall prestige and income of a university.

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dman
I never got the link between sports programs and academic prestige.

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jofer
Eh, I can see it for undergraduate admissions, etc. I'm very skeptical as
well.

However, I know some very smart people who did actually choose their
undergraduate program based partly on the football team.

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ry0ohki
I chose my school partly because I followed the basketball team as a kid. It's
free marketing. I never heard of half of the small division III schools in my
area, but all of the big state schools were on my radar because of sports.

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eurleif
>It's free marketing.

Expensive marketing.

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pitt1980
that's a big chunk of everything,

when you buy a pop out of the machine, what fraction of what your paying for
is raw material + production cost and what percentage is so the can pay for
superbowl ads so the next time you're thirsty their brand is the first the
pops into your head?

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bluedino
And the highest-paid person you graduated high school with is probably a
player (assuming you went to a run-of-the-mill public school)

A guy I graduated with plays in the NBA, and makes somewhere around 6 million
a year, which is about the league average. He'll probably be retired in a few
more years but he'll still have had a good 10-12 years of making an extremely
high salary.

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callmeed
That's okay, it probably won't last:

 _Sports Illustrated estimated in 2009 that 78 percent of NFL players are
bankrupt or facing serious financial stress within two years of ending their
playing careers and that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years
of retiring from the game._

[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/story/2012-04-22/Pro-a...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/story/2012-04-22/Pro-
athletes-and-financial-trouble/54465664/1)

~~~
bluedino
Very common. A kid who got drafted the same year from the rival high school
across town OWES the team that drafted him $10 million.

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Shivetya
What about elected state employees? I know in Georgia the top two are tax
commissioners. The real issue isn't their salary so much as the pensions and
other retirement perks many already highly compensated public employees,
elected, appointed, or otherwise, collect, and how soon they can collect.
Throw in double dipping and the numbers get high quick

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gnoway
An old thread now, but I thought this article was pretty topical, re: one of
the highest-paid coaches in college football:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanriper/2013/05/13/the-
magic...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanriper/2013/05/13/the-magic-of-
nick-saban-everyone-wants-to-go-to-alabama/)

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bluedino
Is the data out there find out what the highest paid programmer/database
administrator/'IT manager' is per state?

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ebbv
This is really misleading because while state colleges are ostensibly public
institutions nowadays most of them (especially ones that pay their coaches a
shit ton of money) are not receiving the majority of their funding from public
sources.

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larrik
Hey, my state is the only one where the highest paid employee is specifically
for women's sports. He is not a woman himself, though.

Nevada is completely appropriate, though.

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dpritchett
I was extra tickled that the highest paid public employee in Nevada (read: Las
Vegas) is a plastic surgeon.

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ttrreeww
And a CEO or Sales guy is probably the highest paid employee of a software
company.

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GabrielF00
But the CEO and the Sales guy are key to the software company's mission. The
football coach is not key to either education or research.

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JoeKM
That's silly, the coach is key to the athletics department he was hired to
work for, just as the CEO and sales guy are key to their respective
departments (or in the case of the CEO, the entire company).

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ttrreeww
So innocent :) CEOs more often then not, are not essential to the company.
Sales guy maybe, but plenty of them sell based on company inertia.

Now a coach on the other hand...

