Are we out of our minds? LSU's women's basketball coach makes $2.5 million and has 171 pairs of shoes

 General Motors found a cash cow when it created GMAC, its lucrative auto financing arm. People said that GM evolved from being a car maker with a finance company to a financial institution that also made automobiles.

We might say something similar about the nation's public universities. Once, they were educational institutions that offered varsity sports. Now they are becoming sports franchises that educate students as a side business.

Look at Louisiana State University, the Pelican State's flagship public university. According to Tiger Rag, "the Bible of LSU Sports," LSU's football program spent $25 million in salaries and wages last year and lost almost $14 million in Fiscal Year 2022.  

LSU's head football coach Brian Kelly makes about $6.5 million annually. Ed Orgeron, who took LSU to a national championship, was bought out in 2021, costing LSU's athletic program $17 million.

Kim Mulkey, LSU's women's basketball coach, makes $2.5 million a year and owns 171 pairs of shoes. She also has a gig endorsing Gordon McKernan, a personal injury lawyer. Her likeness appears on billboards all over Baton Rouge. 

Speaking of Gordon McKernan, perhaps Baton Rouge's leading personal injury attorney, he estimates that he gave between $750,000 and $1,000,000 to NIL (short for "Names, Images, and Likeness,") an outfit that helps college athletes sell their "brand" by marketing themselves for cash.

How much money do LSU football players get for selling their brands? According to Tiger Rag, LSU's 85 scholarship football players are worth an average of $479,000!

And then there is the sports betting revenue. LSU proudly announced that it was the first university in the Southeastern Conference to sign a contract with a gaming company. Sports betting is now advertised in Tiger Stadium (along with the Louisiana Lottery). 

LSU's spin doctors emphasize that much of the money that pours into LSU athletics comes from its athletic foundation, which is a separate entity from the university. This is true, but does it make sense for wealthy individuals and corporations to get tax breaks for supporting university sports? 

LSU's Tiger Athletic Foundation generated $41 million in revenue in 2021, mostly from donations from wealthy individuals and businesses. And LSU is the only school in the SEC that gets more donations for athletics than it does for academics.

Of course, everyone in Louisiana loves sports. I get pumped when the LSU Tigers play one of their arch-rivals during the SEC football season.  But who can afford a ticket to a ballgame, much less the eight-dollar beer sold in the stadium?

I wonder whether Louisianians are focused on the right things--the future of our youth, for example.

Louisiana's public universities rank next to last in terms of return on investments for students enrolled in them. According to U.S. News, Louisiana ranks #48 in education. The state is the nation's second poorest, with a poverty rate of almost 18 percent. 

Some Louisianians are doing fine. LSU football players get paid to endorse Hooters and a personal injury lawyer.  The athletic coaches are getting rich, and even some assistant coaches make more than a million dollars a year.

Yet our state's public schools are the third worst in the US, and our coastline loses the equivalent of a football field every ninety minutes.

Maybe Louisians should rethink their priorities. In the meantime, Go Tigers!!

Kim Mulkey, you look fabulous!

Paul Campos says that college presidents and varsity coaches "are robbing us blind," and he is right

Paul Campos, a professor at the University of  Colorado Law School, wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education on the astounding salaries paid to college football and basketball coaches, who are now making far more money than university presidents. 

Campos commented specifically on the salary paid to Louisiana State University's new football coach, Brian Kelly, and Michigan State University's contract with its football coach, Mel Tucker. Tucker and Kelly both got ten-year contracts worth $95 million.

Varsity coaches are paid far more than college presidents, but they too are making out like bandits. As Campos points out:

[T]he outrageous athletic salaries can even seem to justify the administrative overpay. By a kind of perverse psychological effect, paying a college football coach $10 million per year makes paying a university president $1.5 million, a provost $800,000, and various vice provosts and vice chancellors $500,000 each seem positively parsimonious by comparison. 

Campos notes that most universities operate as tax-exempt charitable institutions,  but they have been captured "by the most rapacious forms of contemporary capitalism." Or, as the Campos essay's headline put it, "Coaches and Presidents Are Robbing Us Blind."

Meanwhile, undergraduates are increasingly being taught by graduate students and non-tenured instructors who are paid a mere pittance.  At my former university, some instructors are paid less than $3,000 per course. If they teach five courses per semester (a killing teaching load), they work at the poverty level.

Meanwhile, the football coach makes three-quarters of a million dollars a year.

LSU's new football coach makes $9.5 million a year and gets personal access to private jet

LSU signs $95 million contract with new football coach: "We must have been our of our minds."

 John Prine and Melba Montgomery recorded a great country song a few years ago: We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds." The song tells the story of a couple who foolishly broke up because they both thought they loved someone else.

Then they realized their mistake. 

They both turned out to be the wrong kind. Oh, we must have been out of our minds.

That song should be LSU's theme song.  A few days ago, LSU hired Brian Kelly, who currently coaches at Notre Dame, to be LSU's next football coach. 

LSU and Kelly signed a ten-year contract for $95 million. Ninety-five million! And that doesn't include various incentives and endorsements. I predict Kelly will soon be promoting chicken fingers on local television stations--which will earn him even more money.

Kelly is 60 years old. What are the odds that he'll still be coaching for LSU ten years from now?

Not good, I believe. Scott Rabalais, a sports columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate, pointed out that seven of the last ten LSU football coaches were fired.

LSU bought out its last two coaches' contracts. The university cashed out Les Miles for $10 million. Coach Orgeron, LSU's current football coach, got bought out for $17 million. 

And Miles and Orgeron both brought home national championships!

Stephanie Riegel, writing last year for the Baton Rouge Business Report, said LSU is mired in moral bankruptcy. She referenced a video of the 2019 football championship team dancing to a "bounce" song titled Get the Gat at the White House.

The lyrics of Get the Gat are misogynistic, to put it mildly. Here are some sample lines:

You ain’t nun but a dope man’s bitch . . .

Cuz I’m a [N word] wit a rock hard bone
And I’m takin’ one of these hoes home.

Gat, by the way, is a slang word for a gun. 

LSU must be out of its mind. The university recently renovated the football team's locker room at the cost of $28 million. The revamped facilities include a performance nutrition center and cushy study areas that feature "sleep pods." 

Meanwhile, the LSU library looks like a Dollar Store on the wrong side of town, and the university is muddling through a sexual misconduct scandal by student-athletes.

LSU's communications execs tireless assure the public that all the costs run up by the football program are paid by the athletic foundation, not tuition money.  Maybe that's true.

Nevertheless, all this football hype is not improving LSU's academic standing. The law school dropped 13 places in last year's U.S. News & World Report rankings. The university as a whole ranks 1lth in the U.S. News rankings among the fourteen schools in the Southeast Conference, just above Missippi State, Old Miss, and Arkansas.

But LSU is number one in at least one category. The university is the first SEC school to sign a sports-betting contract with a gaming company.

Go Tigers!

Sleep pod in LSU football locker room: Nighty Night!