NCAA Revenue is Ridiculous

Some of the highest revenue schools in the NCAA earn between 40 million and 80 million dollars in profits each year from athletic. With this money, they pay their coaches million dollar salaries to bring home the championship for their respective sport, and with championships comes money.The combined salaries of the highest-paid college football coaches in 2011 was $53.4 million. An example of these huge salaries is Ohio State University agreeing to pay head coach Urban Meyer $24 million over six years, or $4 million a year. The estimated average compensation for head football coaches at public universities is more than $2 million per year, a 750 percent increase. 

This increase is more than 20 times the percentage increase for college professors. In Division I basketball, average coach salaries now exceed $4 million a year. College football and men’s basketball are huge business enterprises, generating more than $6 billion a year in annual revenue—even more than the NBA, and the NBA is a professional program.

Some people who want things to go back to the way it use to be, when education comes first at a college, fit right in to a quote in Don DeLillo's White Noise. "Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence." In this case, violence can also mean changing things back to the way it used to be. Unfortunately for these people, more and more money is going toward the NCAA and its athletic programs. 

Big brands like Nike, adidas, Reebok and Under Armour are writing huge checks to schools, but the marketing of sports shoes, equipment, and clothing through college sports  is just the tip of the iceberg. Food, alcohol, credit card and auto companies (to name a few) are also spending money on college sports. According to Sonny Vaccaro, the former sports marketing executive who signed Michael Jordan with Nike, 90 percent of the NCAA’s revenue is produced by one percent of the athletes. These athletes mostly come from the football and basketball programs, which generate the biggest fan bases and highest revenue. So with all of this money, why don't these programs pay their student-athletes?