Paying Football Players?

It was just a little more than five years ago that Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney spoke out against the idea of paying college players.

“Mm-mmm. No,” Swinney said. “Absolutely not,” he said at the Atlantic Coast Conference’s football kickoff media day.

He hadn’t yet won a national championship. Nor did he yet have a contract that paid him an average of $ 6.75 million a year. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Clemson has played Alabama twice in the last three years for the national championship. Alabama’s Nick Saban’s salary is $7.125 million. He is the highest-paid state employee in Alabama.

Maybe you are a student, paying your athletics fee, and tuition, and room and board, and working part-time. You might wonder if these sort of expenditures on one person are worth it. Maybe you are a student-athlete, wondering if the damage football does your body is worth the exchange for a scholarship (though that’s a choice freely made).

It is an endless goodie bag for coaches at the upper echelon of college football. As Groucho Marx once famously observed, we cannot afford both the college and the football team. So tomorrow we start tearing down the college.

In its quest to win a championship, Texas A&M hired Jimbo Fisher away from Florida State. It didn’t take much. Just a base salary of $500,000 … and a “supplemental” income of $7 million. Annually.

But wait … there’s more. He gets the use of two luxury vehicles (how many rear ends does he have?). He gets a country club membership. Use of a private plane (not to exceed $300,000 a year). More than a dozen football tickets per game. Basketball tickets. And if he wins that elusive national title, a $1 million bonus.

The players? They get an education.

They can really get an education if they take a look at what their coach is getting paid.

 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman