USA TODAY: Hammers Pinkel pay

Pinkel"Athletic departments spend away while academics — the schools' reason for being — are getting slammed."

 

COLUMBIA, 12/17/09 (Beat Byte) --  Though not locally reported much when it appeared last month, a USA Today story about the high price Mizzou pays for football coaches has raised troubling questions about the increasing disparity between academics and athletics. 

 

Relative to his predecessors, Gary Pinkel has been a good -- some might even say great -- head coach.  His salary -- which has quadrupled in eight years, to $2.52 million this season -- isn't out of line with peer programs:  Pinkel is now the fourth-highest paid coach in the Big 12 conference. 

 

The problem is less about Coach Pinkel's position on the salary totem and more about how the rest of the university, at the compensation bottom of 17 peer institutions in surrounding states, isn't keeping pace with the athletic department.  

 

Forking over a mountain of cash to athletic program leaders isn't having the trickle down effect used to justify each salary hike.  If it were, the thinking goes, budgets would be a lot brighter in more places than just the athletic department. 

 

Including salaries, USA Today reports that Missouri's total spending on football has nearly doubled in five years: from around $7 million in 2004 to a projected $13.2 million this year.  Overall athletic outlays have gone up by more than a third in that time, to a projected $64 million in 2009-10.

 

This while the rest of the school faces an ever-growing fiscal woe pile-up that has created an uncanny lopsidedness: A fast-growing athletic program sitting atop a shrinking university.   

 

As USA Today notes, MU has instituted a systemwide hiring freeze, frozen the pay of most of its approximately 18,000 full-time faculty and staff and tinkered with its pension plan.  Historically, the picture isn't much better. 

 

"It's something Division I athletics has to be aware of and come to terms with, ultimately," Missouri Chancellor Brady Deaton says. "Because given the factors in play right now, it's not clear this is a sustainable path."

 

"The average MU full professor's salary rose only 9% — to $102,800 — in the four years from 2004 to 2008, according to surveys by the American Association of University Professors," USA Today reports.  "University expenditures at Missouri essentially stayed flat from fiscal 2004-05 to 2007-08, falling a little less than one-half of 1%.  Overall athletics spending climbed almost 12%, while spending on football assistants' salaries rose 32%. 

 

And from 2000 to 2008, Pinkel's salary climbed 331%.  Atop his guarantee, Pinkel — who declined to speak on the record about his salary — can pocket as much as $850,000 in a given year in incentives.

 

Though he supports high coach compensation because it improves Mizzou's image, Martin Rucker, a Democratic state representative from St. Joseph, told USA Today he "detected some unease when the school gave Pinkel his latest extended contract and raise near the end of last season." 

 

"A few other legislators, I don't know if they were really upset, but (they were) just questioning, 'Why would you give the guy a raise when we're here trying to balance the budget and we're cutting this and cutting that and can't give all the money we want to higher ed?'" said Rucker.

 

Basketball coach Mike Anderson saw his pay increase $500,000 last year, to $1.35 million annually.  All these increases didn't sit well with Republican Mike Thomson, a Missouri state representative from Maryville.  "When you pay that much money to athletics personnel simply because of the competitive situation, it really comes across wrong, especially to those who are involved in education," Thomson told USA Today.  "But I totally understand the other side of it — what a successful athletic program does for the whole university." 

 

But there comes the paradox again.  What is the true meaning of "successful athletic program" amidst budget cuts, hiring freezes, pension plan hits, and fiscal woes for virtually every other department? 

 

"It's something Division I athletics has to be aware of and come to terms with, ultimately," Missouri Chancellor Brady Deaton told USA Today. "Because given the factors in play right now, it's not clear this is a sustainable path."

 

But Deaton stopped short of condemning the practice at Mizzou. "I don't sense any big battle on campus at all about this," he said.  "I think all the faculty are committed to using, in a sense, the athletic success for the overall success of the university."

 

READ ALL ABOUT IT:

 

Missouri shows how schools pay a price for football success

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/2009-11-10-missouri-coaches-salaries_N.htm