31 December 2014

U. of Michigan becomes Harbaugh Institute of Athletic Excess

Update, 13:10:35 MST. You’ll want to read the LA Times’ story on the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s dropping football.

Jim Harbaugh landed on his feet after parting ways with the San Francisco 49ers, where he was the head coach. He landed at the University of Michigan, which gave him a seven-year, $5 million per year, contract to practice his specialty: coaching the brutal game of college football. And according to public officials in Michigan, it won’t cost the taxpayers a cent:

It’s true – big-time programs like Michigan can pay coaches inflated salaries because the money is there, and they choose to pay the salaries because they want to keep the money there.

The entirety of deposed Michigan coach Brady Hoke’s salary and buyout – $14.4 million over his four-year tenure – came from Michigan athletic department coffers and not taxpayers, State Budget Office spokesman Kurt Weiss said. The public university is expected to pay Harbaugh solely through revenue and donations the athletic department generated, with no money from the state included.

“Our records show [Michigan’s athletic department] would likely have enough money,” Weiss said.

Sportswriters are bemoaning an athletics “arms race” that lesser institutions might not be able to afford. But few if any are bemoaning the corruption of the university as an institution of learning where books are more important than pieces of leather fashioned into prolate spheroids.

What university that values academics can afford in any moral sense to pay a coach even as much as the mostly lowly teaching assistant in the humanities, science or engineering, or law? And what university that values the human mind, that wants to develop brainpower, can in good conscience even be connected with a game that causes brain damage in addition to battering the rest of the players’ bodies so badly that a fearful number end up with metal knees and joints before they qualify for Social Security — provided they’re fortunate enough to live that long?

The University of Michigan once was a great school. Now it’s just the Harbaugh Institute of Athletic Excess. What a waste.