College coaches and power: How much is too much?

(USA TODAY) -- Alabama is where Joe Namath is said to have used the school president's parking spot as his own, where it's less a joke than honest truth that the governor toils in the shadow of the flagship university's football coach.

COMPLETE REPORT |?College coaches and power: How much is too much?

Current University of Alabama President Robert Witt tore at that football-foremost notion almost as soon as he took the job nearly nine years ago, ousting misbehaving Mike Price before the newly named coach ever worked a game. As engineering professor Clark Midkiff remembers, "It was rumored that a member of the board of trustees did not want him to fire Coach Price, and Bob Witt said, 'It's either me or him.'

"Were that to be a situation between him and Nick Saban, who would win?" Midkiff says of the man who has coached today's Crimson Tide within reach of a second national championship in three years.

He still likes Witt's chances, he says, but concedes, "I don't know."

The same question once hung over Joe Paterno and Penn State.

Before Saban, before Bob Stoops at Oklahoma and before the full ascent of the likes of Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, Connecticut's Jim Calhoun and Michigan State's Tom Izzo in basketball, Paterno was casting a giant shadow in Happy Valley. The degree to which he used, and perhaps misused, his stature and influence has emerged as an issue in the scandal that felled him and Penn State President Graham Spanier last month.

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It has called new attention to the coaches who remain deities on their campuses and in their states, parlaying success, fame and indispensability into power - and to the ability of their bosses to keep them reined in.

Schools are checking their checks and balances. "I think everybody is doing a reassessment," Miami (Fla.) President Donna Shalala said. The NCAA's president, Mark Emmert, suggests it should step in with new rules that would keep coaches from butting into admissions, discipline and other areas that are supposed to be university business.

"The strain between modern-day intercollegiate athletics and the modern-day university ... has very gradually escalated over the last 25 years," says Stan Ikenberry, once a vice president at Penn State and a former president of the American Council on Education.

"The power coach is a major dimension of that - football and men's basketball coaches who've had a record of success over a number of years and have developed a fan base and, at times, they begin to overshadow the institution itself."

John Thompson fit that profile at Georgetown, winning 596 games and an NCAA championship in 27 seasons before retiring as the Hoyas' basketball coach in 1999.

"Those people you're talking about worked very hard to get that kind of loyalty, to get that kind of respect, to get that kind of admiration. And most of them are deserving of it," he says. "But at what point do you say enough is enough? "

Big money, big influence

Paterno's 46-year head coaching tenure started at Penn State in 1966. By then, basketball's John Wooden was two national championships into his unparalleled, 10-title reign at UCLA. Paul "Bear" Bryant had won three of his six in football at Alabama. Bob Knight had just started at Army, ultimately bound for stardom at Indiana, and Bobby Bowden was an assistant headed for West Virginia, then 34 years at Florida State.

The power coaching ranks swell faster today. Tenures tend not to run as long. Only two of 120 coaches in the bowl subdivision and five of 74 in marquee conferences in Division I men's basketball have been at their schools as long as 15 years in a row. But permanence no longer seems necessary. Media saturation brings instant celebrity. A star-struck society gives easy deference.

So there's Stoops and Frank Beamer, who've combined for 14 Bowl Championship Series appearances in 13 and 25 years, respectively, at Oklahoma and Virginia Tech. But there's also Chip Kelly, whose three years as a head coach at Oregon have taken the Ducks to the Rose Bowl, the BCS championship game and back this season to the Rose.

Dollar signs are a factor, as well.

Gate receipts for Oklahoma football tripled in Stoops' first seven years. Athletics donations quadrupled. The school's athletics revenues went from $26 million in 1998-99, the year before his arrival, to more than $93 million last year, according to data provided by the school.

Football accounted for nearly half that take in 2010-11 - $45.4 million - and the sport turned a more than $22 million profit and kept Oklahoma's 21-team athletics program in the black.

Saban's impact at Alabama is similar. Ticket demand spiked, and was accommodated by stadium expansion. Marketing and other media rights took off. Football revenues rose 38% in the first four of Saban's five years, hitting almost $77 million and providing a more than $45 million profit in 2010, according to federal filings.

Those are critical, leverage-building numbers at a time when fewer than two dozen major-college athletics programs are in the black and higher education is in the throes of a financial crisis that makes the subsidization of sports harder and more controversial.

"Does it give that particular coach or the football program more power on campus?" says Miami's Shalala. "Yeah, it probably gives them a level of visibility and power. But that cannot be translated in a way that breaks the rules."

At Connecticut, where men's and women's basketball and coaches Jim Calhoun and Geno Auriemma deliver both championships and profits, President Susan Herbst preaches similar caution.

"It's wrong," she says, "to have one revenue stream, that's not an academically related one, driving university decision-making. If the revenue stream is from, say, a faculty invention that one can market - a drug or a vaccine - and the university is greatly benefited by royalties and patents and that kind of thing, that's great.

"But if it's something that's very much apart from, and often in tension with the values of the university, you've got to be super cautious."

Both she and Shalala can attest to the messiness of the relationship between big-time sports and the colleges and universities that sponsor them.

UConn's Calhoun is sitting out his team's first three Big East Conference games this season, suspended by the NCAA as part of penalties handed down last February for recruiting violations under his watch. Miami is under NCAA investigation after an imprisoned ex-booster told Yahoo! Sports how he lavished illicit benefits on more than 70 former and current athletes at the school, the biggest ongoing scandal in college athletics until Penn State blew up. One photo from that case shows Shalala smiling in the background as the booster, Nevin Shapiro, announces a $50,000 donation to the university's basketball program in 2008 that he later admitted was money gleaned from a Ponzi scheme.

At Syracuse, a coach's apparent hubris contributed to a lawsuit. Jim Boeheim forcefully defended former assistant Bernie Fine against allegations from two former ballboys of sexual abuse, saying the men were lying and looking for money. At a press conference when asked whether anyone at the school tried to quiet him, Boeheim replied, "Do you think anybody tells me when to speak or not?" He later apologized but Bobby Davis and Mike Lang nonetheless filed a defamation lawsuit against Boeheim and the school.

Paid 'as big shots'

Whatever restraint is sought in college athletics, it doesn't extend to coaches' salaries. Critics ask: When Kelly, at $2.8 million this season, plus up to another $1 million-plus in incentives, makes at least four times more at Oregon than the university president and Oregon system president combined, whose is the upper hand? And this at a school currently under NCAA investigation for payments to Will Lyles who ran a high school scouting service.

Ohio State, which saw combustible Woody Hayes flame out with punch at an opposing player during a 1978 bowl, lost another power coach to scandal this year in Jim Tressel. The Buckeyes replaced him with Urban Meyer, another star with a national championship resume whose six-year contract guarantees him at least $4 million a year plus $2.4 million in retention bonuses if he stays through the 2017 season.

OSU's Gordon Gee is the nation's highest paid public-college president, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. But his $1.3 million in total compensation in 2009-10 pales in comparison.

"Naturally, these coaches are big shots. We're paying them as big shots," says former UCLA chancellor and Florida president Charles Young. "That, in my opinion, is one of the worst things."

It was Gee who uttered a cringe-inducing acknowledgement of celebrity coaching power last March, saying 12 weeks prior to Tressel's ouster, "Let me be very clear. I'm just hoping the coach doesn't dismiss me." Additional accusations against Tressel, who'd already admitted covering up a series extra-benefit violations by several players, finally forced Ohio State's hand.

Paterno flexed his muscle most famously in 2004. He was in his late 70s, his teams were struggling on the field, and Spanier, athletics director Tim Curley and other Penn State superiors tried to convince him the time had come to retire. They couldn't. Paterno stayed on until the vileness of sexual abuse allegations against longtime assistant Jerry Sandusky- and questions about what Paterno knew and may not have told - swept him away.

Young says he was among the very few who wasn't surprised.

He and Paterno had been crossways on NCAA issues back in the 1980s, when the then-UCLA chancellor saw the famous coach rise in ballrooms crowded with top administrators - bringing a hush - and help sway votes against academic measures that Young and others were pushing.

"Things would be going along just swimmingly, and then Joe Paterno would get up and he'd turn the heads of ADs and others," says Young, who in retirement remains a member of the reform-minded Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.

"How can I put it? The fact that he was there (at Penn State) for what, 45 years (actually 46 as head coach) and stayed on coaching until he was past 80 led me to believe that, just as he had too much sway in the NCAA, he probably had too much power and too much room and too little oversight at Penn State. And therefore, something might happen."

Aside from whether Paterno erred in handling allegations and perhaps other signs of Sandusky's abuse, he and the school have come under fire for what one former vice president says was Paterno's ability to subvert university policy in disciplining football players charged with crimes. The vice president, Vicky Triponey, oversaw Penn State's Office of Judicial Affairs, and told USA TODAY last month that she lost a power struggle with the coach and was forced in 2007 to resign.

All that, of course, belies the image of a revered coach who not only won a record 409 games but also cultivated an 87% player graduation rate and was a multi-million-dollar donor to Penn State's academic side.

"He in many ways epitomizes all that is good and healthy about intercollegiate athletics, the attempt to harmonize athletics with the academic program," says Ikenberry, who was Penn State's vice president for administration in the 1970s and is moving back to State College, Pa., where he'll reconnect with the university as an adjunct professor. "But also, Joe was always very competitive as a coach. That's why he has more victories than anybody else at a Division I school and was a successful over a long number of years. So he's not immune to having the same impulses and the same pressures that every other coach has."

Krzyzewski is the modern Wooden, college basketball's ultimate winner and paragon. Mindful of his stature and influence at Duke, athletics director Kevin White says he sought out Krzyzewski and a few others before moving from Notre Dame to Durham, N.C., in 2008 "to kind of get a sense of how this was going to work."

He was immediately comfortable, he says, and remains so.

"A power guy, to me, is somebody who's only interested in advancing their own agenda," White says. "Mike's a greater-good guy. I think that's how he's wired."

At Alabama, Paul "Bear" Bryant will forever be school's and state's highest deity. But Saban, in his fifth year as the Crimson Tide's coach, has taken a place at his right hand, winning better than 80% of the time and his program spitting out those eight-figure profits. His current team, at 11-1, will meet LSU in the BCS' Jan. 9 championship game in New Orleans.

Three years ago, Forbes magazine noted Saban's total control of the football program - from recruiting to coaching to business administration to public relations - and proclaimed him the most powerful coach in U.S. sports.

Midkiff, a member of the Alabama faculty since 1986 and current president of its faculty senate, is cautious. "We're obviously very fertile soil for potential abuse," he says of the statewide obsession with football. But he says he's mostly satisfied there are no chain-of-command issues."

Young recalls conversations with his late friend, John Ryan, when Ryan was the president at Indiana University and the mercurial Knight - as famous for his fits of temper as his high win count and three national championships - was the Hoosiers' basketball coach in the 1980s.

Knight erupted profanely during an NCAA tournament news conference. He kicked his son, an IU assistant, during a sideline tirade, and responded with a four-letter obscenity to Indiana fans behind him who booed. He survived those incidents. He refused to let his team finish an exhibition against a Soviet team. A former player claimed Knight once choked him. He survived that, too, though the latter elicited a zero-tolerance policy from Ryan's successor, the late Myles Brand.

Knight finally was fired before the 2000 season, crossing the zero-tolerance line when an Indiana student claimed he'd twisted his arm and berated him after the student addressed the coach by his last name.

Young says of Ryan: "I kept telling him, 'Why don't you fire him?' And he said, 'Oh, I couldn't fire him because of the alumni.' People have to stand up and tell the alumni they're not running the damned university. And the coaches aren't."

He's insistent that constraints are necessary.

Young has trust in Krzyzewski, he says. But it doesn't extend to many coaches beyond him. "I think there are incorruptible people," Young says. "They're few and far between, and not too many of them are football coaches or basketball coaches."

Basketball salaries

Top 10 coaches' compensation for 2010-2011 Division I men's basketball season:
Coach (School), Total pay*
1. Rick Pitino (Louisville). $7,531,378
2. Mike Krzyzewski (Duke), $4,195,519
3. John Calipari (Kentucky), $3,917,000
4. Bill Self (Kansas), $3,615,656
5. Billy Donovan (Florida), $3,575,400
6. Tom Izzo (Michigan StateA), $3,565,000
7. Thad Matta (Ohio State), $2,649,000
8. Sean Miller (Arizona), $2,305,805
9. Jim Calhoun (Connecticut), $2,300,000
10. Rick Barnes (Texas), $2,200,000
*List includes coaches whose teams made the 68-team NCAA tournament field.
Source: Individual schools, USA TODAY research.
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Football salaries

Top 10 coaches' compensation for 2011 Football Bowl Subdivision season:

Coach (School), Total pay*

1. Mack Brown (Texas) $5,193,500
2. Nick Saban (Alabama), $4,833,333
3. Bob Stoops (Oklahoma), $4,075,000
4. Les Miles (LSU), $3,856,417
5. Kirk Ferentz (Iowa), $3,785,000
6. Bobby Petrino (Arkansas), $3,638,000
7. Gene Chizik (Auburn), $3,500,000
8. Brady Hoke (Michigan), $3,254,000
9. Will Muschamp (Florida), $3,221,000
10. Mark Richt (Georgia), $2,939,800

Figures are from about 100 public institutions among the 120 FBS schools.

Source: Individual schools.

Source: http://athens.11alive.com/news/news/96212-college-coaches-and-power-how-much-too-much

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