Guess who the highest-paid state employee is in most of the 50 states?
It’s normally a college football or men’s college basketball coach. In some cases, the coach may earn that money by bringing in a ton of revenue for their school. However, there is often no reason for schools to pay coaches such outrageous salaries.
As of 2017, these football and men’s basketball coaches took the top spot for highest-paid state employee in 39 of the 50 states, according to ESPN. That’s the case even though NCAA Division 1 college sports programs lose a lot of money.
That year, the highest-paid state employee for Massachusetts was Derek Kellogg, the men’s basketball coach for the University of Massachusetts. He made just shy of $1 million per year. Is that because the UMass men’s basketball team is some amazing draw that brings a ton of money into the school’s coffers? Nope. That year, more than $37 million of the $48 million that funded the UMass athletic department came from student fees and school funding (not revenue from its teams). That’s a bad deal for students and taxpayers. They are funding a massive salary for a service that loses money.
The same year, UMass Lowell, the other NCAA Division 1 state school in Massachusetts, used about $17 million in school funding for its roughly $20 million athletic department. One way to put it is that these two UMass athletic programs lose more than $50 million per year combined. Somehow, they have coaches who are extremely wealthy despite not bringing much money to the schools.
In the 2017-2018 school year, UMass Lowell men’s hockey coach Norm Bazin made $440,000. His salary is now over $500,000 per year. That makes him one of the higher-paid state employees in the commonwealth. College hockey is not a revenue sport, the cost of college is insane, and yet, this is somehow something students and taxpayers have to fund.
There are rare instances where paying exorbitant amounts of money to college sports coaches is justifiable. If an athletic department, on net, is a money maker for a school, then it makes sense to pay hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for elite coaches. At that point, the argument can be made that said coaches are necessary to keep the money coming in. But when the average NCAA Division 1 athletic program loses more than $14 million per year, that’s a poor investment to make. Overpaid coaches make the situation worse.
Paying these people lucrative salaries to lose money is fiscally irresponsible and something politicians in every state need to address.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports ) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
