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A modest proposal to moderate coaches’ compensation

These are a bit out of control – just take a look at my cousin Jim’s:

Every now and then the NCAA university presidents say they are going to try and do something about this. The NCAA then tells them that anti-trust law prevents them from conspiring to lower wages, they give up, and the coaches get still more.

Which is weird, because the NCAA specializes in evading labor market law to suppress student-athlete wages. Surely they could figure out how to work this on coaches, if the university presidents got serious.

How about this proposal, for starters: Have all the coaches work for the NCAA, not the university athletic departments. The NCAA could then set a wage as an employer, not as a cartel. Say $250K for each BCS coach, with cost of living increases. Al Roth could then run a matching mechanism where universities list their top coaches, and coaches list their top universities, and they are matched iteratively. The proper algorithm would produce an stable and strategy proof outcome where no coach would like to move to a university that would have them, and no university would like to replace their coach with another one that would move there. Since tastes and performance change, this could be rerun every few years.

Unmatched coaches could collect unemployment insurance.

5 Comments

  1. thedude 11/26/2018

    Monopsony is only for faculty, grad students and athletes. This is a a pipe dream….

  2. Thanks for you though 11/26/2018

    Your proposal would go a long way to reducing faculty and administrative salaries too

    • Dog 11/27/2018

      How did you know?

      My contract explicitly states that my academic salary
      will = 15% of the Football Coaches annual salary –
      it’s fantastic

  3. duckduckgo 11/27/2018

    Our previous offensive coordinator, Scott Frost, is making $5 million a year at Nebraska. Nebraska has a profit of $7 million.

    If Apple paid its CEO at the same kind of % of profit, Tim Cook would make $20 billion a year, instead of the $100 million he makes!

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