If this story is true, what a bunch of bed wetters. Sheesh.
As long as college athletics are more important than college academics, this will continue to be a problem. How can we tell that college athletics trump all at these school? Show me ONE professor—anywhere—whose college paycheck exceeds 2-1/2 million dollars a year. Athletic scholarships are given to hundreds upon hundreds of students and the students who are more interested in actually learning something have to pay higher tuition to compensate for it. “Athletes” on a free ride take up scarce slots in courses.
We watched for years as Bob Knight plied his boorish behavior all over Indiana, and later Texas, whith his sole justification being from the moronic callers into my Indiana-based radio show who repeated the same brain-dead refrain when asked to justify Knight’s existence and indefensible salary: “Budd-eee wins BAWLLL-games!”
Coaches like this are frequently quivering cowards outside the locker room where no one would dare challenge their wrath: Knight had a weekly call-in radio show but callers were never, ever allowed to actually talk directly to Knight—their questions were written down by screeners and the in-studio hosts asked only those questions that would not upset Indiana’s basketball messiah. Broadasters or print journalists who asked questions that upset the cowardly Knight found their press credentials pulled.
Even more pathetic is that these young adults who were in fact students were taught to idolize such jagdorkery and eventually accepted this as acceptable adult behavior. Just like Ward Churchill who hid behind the farcical shield of “Academic Freedom” while spewing his hatred all over Colorado, the Knights of the world cloak themselves in their contracts and administrators who are even more weak-kneed who dare not challenge the coach. This sad sack in Texas has been widely quoted calling the college’s administration names, he should have been launched for that the first time it happened, just as the rest of us would be launched for publicly denigrating your employer’s senior leadership. The fact that they allowed him to stay “caussee wins bawwll games” instead of ridding the school of this pot-bellied cancer makes them guilty by complicity. It is ironic that the coach that must also promote physical fitness among athletes is so morbidly obese himself—”those tho can’t...teach.” Shame on the university president as well—he should be replaced immediately by a college administrator who wants to run a college and not a football program.
The real fault, however, does not lie with these coaches—they are a symptom of the diesase. The cause is college adminitrators who let these oversized contracts to athletics coaches without instant termination clauses for asinine behavior, and the host organism is colleges who cowtow to alumni who demand football and basketball dominance.
I have no problem with college athletics—but its importance in this country is shameful, and sends a deafneningly loud message to the rest of the world: We’re ready to have our butts handed to us. Make athletes find the cash or loans to attend these uber-expensive schools like people who can’t throw or catch a ball have to do.
Nor is this a blanket indictment of athletics coaches. Many are hardworking employees with a real talent for the games that they coach, a love for the players in their charge, and who want to see their students succeed off the field of play. You rarely hear of these people because they just do their job, frequently at smaller scale schools whose sports teams are what they are supposed to be—an adjunct to the higher ideal of higher education. And for their quiet, unassuming performance they earn around what professors do, and frequently less, rather than quintupling the salary of the presient of the university.
Perhaps, in fact almost certainly, the caliber of college athletics will suffer, but if all schools are forced to select athletes from among deserving students, instead of seeking people solely based on athletic ability and making them students ahead of others whose intellectual performance actually merits admission, college athletics will still be competitive, albeit at a lower overall level of performance. But until this country really needs to compete on the world economic stage based on the pass-rush or accuracy form the three point line, this change is what we really need.
You don’t see college baseball or hockey coaches inking 12.7 million dollar contracts...because education in America turns out what America demands of it:
Good football players and good basketball players.
—PP
And we know all of the dirt in this article is true because.... I don’t know a thing about Leach but I should think his players will have more real information than the media.
Let’s see . . . Glen Mason is the coach that couldn’t win consistently when a head coach. He opted for the University of Georgia head position as his Kansas team prepared for the Aloha Bowl. Then he changed his mind one day later. The next year he left Kansas for Minnesota. What a loser. I guess a contract don’t mean anything when it is his.
Perhaps Leach was under contract with Under Armor for his attire. Successful coaches (and golfers like Tiger) have their wardrobe chosen for them in advance. One of my former NFL player clients did. Mason just sounds as if he has sour grapes.
Gwjack