Wisconsin Chancellor: Harbaugh, Meyer overpaid
Jim Harbaugh is making $7 million at Michigan this season, including a $2 million one-time signing bonus, and Urban Meyer is making $5.86 million for defending national champion Ohio State. USA TODAY Sports asked Wisconsin chancellor Rebecca Blank what she makes of Big Ten peers who are paying their coaches so much.
“Those are the choices they make,” she said in an interview for a story about coaching salaries. “That really begins to threaten the whole sense that we are not professional athletic teams. I’m not terribly happy about the fact that they made those choices. That’s my opinion.”
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Blank understands market forces. She was acting secretary of commerce in the Obama administration and holds a doctorate in economics from MIT.
Nevermind that Harbaugh has likely, through ticket sales and merchandising, already generated revenue in excess of his total contract. Also ignore the fact that paying Harbaugh his market value has ZERO impact on the Unversity's academic side of the coin.
If you can forget those two factors, she has a fantastic point.
October 8th, 2015 at 11:31 PM ^
Tell us how you really feel.
October 9th, 2015 at 1:33 AM ^
Capitalism is based on slavery, violence, force, threat, military might or ruthlessness, theft, oppression, exploitation, racism, lies, injustice, propaganda, brainwashing & censorship.
It is the complete polar opposite of getting paid what you're worth you blithering idiot! The people who get paid the most not only are almost always the ones who deserve the least, and earned the least, but usually they should be in prison at the least and executed more often than not.
Capitalism is specifically about getting paid via the work, ideas and efforts that OTHER people do FOR you! The more people you have slave FOR you, and the more you can under pay them for the value they mathematically bring in FOR you, the wealthier you get!
The less you pay of your fair share of taxes that virtually only benefit you, the more you make. The more corporate welfare you get the more you make. The more you bribe the government through quasi legal or illegal methods, the more you make. The more you get to write the laws that "govern" or "regulate" your industry, the more you make. The more you get former and promised future employees filling the "regulatory" roles, the more you make.
The more you can get government contracts for your pyramid scheme company that whooshes all the money up to the top, the more you make. Even though, obviously, a government "of, by, and for the people" that pledges to provide for the general welfare wouldn't allow 90 percent of all government contract work money to be wasted by giving it to the middle man known as the boss in pyramid scheme organizations.
If your beloved giant companies are paying people "what they are worth" then for each contractor who pays the actual workers minimum wage (Obama "generously" raised gov contract workers min wage to $10.10 via executive order), the tax payer with his awful tax "burden" would save 90 percent of his money if the gov hired workers directly and paid them the same ten bucks an hour that the corporate welfare kings and queens who scam the contract do!
Of course the gov contact worker pay minimum should actually be 25 bucks an hour, 50k a year. If we hired directly and paid that living wage the country would still save a gigantic percentage of the tax money we spend on contracts and it would lift millions of workers from poverty and be a gigantic upward spiraling multiplier effect for the whole economy! It would get rid of the useless "takers" at the top of every business and industry and give the money to the people that actually do ALL of the work!
CEO's and bosses die every day and long lasting companies have many bosses, die, quit or get fired over time, yet the company keeps going and keeps making money. Obviously a large company keeps going and keeps functioning and making money without the ex leader. However if you keep the leader and lose the 25, or 50, or 500 or a thousand, or a hundred thousand or the 2 million employees, the company ceases to function and makes no money for anyone!
Apple has 2 million employees. 2 thirds are third world slaves. Steve Jobs said when he made computers by himself he could make one computer a week. Guess who you never would've heard of if all he ever did was work by and for himself making 50 computers a year? Guess who never would've been wealthy? Would he be less of a genius if he hadn't exploited all those people? Without the army of workers there are no big bucks for Jobs to abscond with! Being smart or good or fast is pretty meaningless to getting rich without the "worth less" work & efforts of the masses.
Could Steve have actually done the work of two million people by himself and made all that money? If he could have he would have. He couldn't. He was nothing without them.
Steve is dead but somehow the worthless 2 million employees are still generating just as much cash.
October 9th, 2015 at 3:01 AM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 7:12 AM ^
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October 8th, 2015 at 10:06 PM ^
Doesn't she realize that Wisconsin's current coach makes $2.5 million per year? That's also an obscene salary if your only concern is maintaining the appearance of amateur athletics.
It's like someone driving 10 mph over the speed limit and bitching about another car going 20 mph over.
October 8th, 2015 at 10:19 PM ^
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October 9th, 2015 at 6:19 AM ^
RJ, I know, can't we just pretend that all the terrible parts of things and the suffering of others isn't really there and enjoy our sports and entertainment worry free and politics free regardless of how central politics is to the thing?
Can't we just cheer for the lions against the Christians without being bothered by the fact that those are actually people being torn to shreds or eaten alive? How is that our problem? We just want to watch...
You know, just like good old Dionne Warwick who just wants to sing for the good people of Israel without having to give a shit about what goes on there, the same exact way she did when she played Sun City during the height of apartheid.
She rejected the boycotts then and she rejects them now and gets mad at those who ask her to reconsider and not play there.
I'll bet my life that if I looked it up I'll be able to find some horseshit comments from our psychotic friend celebrating Mandela as a great man and a hero even though she didn't give a fuck about helping him or the cause of his people! Just ignore it and listen to my music!!!
After all, if somebody broke into her house and killed most of her family and servants and ran off the rest of them who had to live in refugee camps, but kept Dionne there locked in a closet, made her work for the privilege of being fed toilet water and then decided to use her house, which they now call their house, as a concert hall and made money from that, she would support other singers entertaining the murderers holding her captive, making money and ignoring the fact that they wiped all those people out, kicked out the others and won't let them back in, and are keeping Dionne captive, right?
Why her case would be no better or different than that of the Palestinians, and why should anyone give a fuck?
She wouldn't want anyone to care, right? She wouldn't want anyone to save her or do anything for her, right? After all that would be letting politics interfere with entertainment and nobody wants to hear about politics they just want music!
How fucking dare anyone bother anyone with politics when they just want a pleasant activity to while away the time with!
Why should she care that Mandela's fellow leaders in the ANC, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu, said that the treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories was WORSE than apartheid South Africa?
She's got some warbling to do and we've got football to worry about!
October 9th, 2015 at 6:43 AM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 6:46 AM ^
October 8th, 2015 at 10:24 PM ^
Harbaugh is a bargain at twice the price. As a matter of fact, JH could have gotten much more than his current salary. As he himself said, he is not on the same dance floor as Mother Teresa, but he is not greedy either. Bottom line, beware of chancellors in general. Blank, Palpatine, etc.
October 8th, 2015 at 10:26 PM ^
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October 8th, 2015 at 10:43 PM ^
If you only pay your coach $1 million a year and you lose all the time, was that better than paying $7 million and winning? Why waste the $1 million on having a football program you don't care about? If you aren't going to spend what it takes to do it right, why are you doing it? Doesn't make economic sense.
October 8th, 2015 at 11:02 PM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 5:08 AM ^
isn't easily refuted. Cause the right candidates is hard to find (See RR)
October 9th, 2015 at 6:39 AM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 9:42 AM ^
It's not about being against the Harbaugh hire!
October 9th, 2015 at 8:04 PM ^
I'm not saying that paying a coach more equals more wins. I am saying that great coach = better chance to win more and great coach = more money. If cheap coach starts winning, cheap coach will become expensive coach pretty fast. Unless he is the rare altruistic guy who refuses to take more.
You are completely correct that there are lots of cases where coaches are paid tons of dollars, only to fail at winning.
October 8th, 2015 at 10:46 PM ^
I could only get through about a 5th of the comments before not being able to take any more of it!
If you guys are intentionally pretending not to understand what her point was then I don't even understand the point of your posts? If she were running for office and you were looking for a way to smear her and make her look stupid, I could understand.
But what's the point of continually bashing someone that has nothing to do with you or with anything that will relate to you or affect you, for things she obviously wasn't talking about and has given you no indications that your absurd criticisms of her understanding and intelligence have anything to do with reality?
The only conclusion to draw is that you're all actually so stupid that you honestly don't understand what she was talking about even though it's right in front of your faces!
I'm sure she can run circles around all of you in terms of understanding the laws and rules and workings of the set of lies and frauds and crimes that make up the economics in our financial system.
October 9th, 2015 at 12:14 AM ^
We get her point. We just think it's stupid.
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October 9th, 2015 at 7:05 AM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 10:44 AM ^
I'm not defending her as much as saying that people are not addressing what she said or making any sense in response to her. The rest you're just not getting.
October 9th, 2015 at 10:34 AM ^
So what is her true point that we all clearly don't see? Is it that she feels education is being devalued for athletics and that is symbolized in coaches salaries? Yeah we get her point. What some of us think is stupid is that she thinks that the salary of a successful coach stands alone as a number and not a representation of larger factors at play like alumni support and donations, endowment contributions, admission applications rising, facility upgrades for the school and non-revenue sports etc.
We get her point. We just think it's stupid.
Well KRK, it's right there in black and yellow quoted in the original post. Didn't you read it? I mean she said the words. There they are. Let's look at them again:
“Those are the choices they make,” she said in an interview for a story about coaching salaries. “That really begins to threaten the whole sense that we are not professional athletic teams. I’m not terribly happy about the fact that they made those choices. That’s my opinion.”
What on earth do her words have to do with understanding economics or market forces or whether it's a sound investment in terms of profitability?
Some of the comments about hypocrisy have some merit but the shitstorm of comments about how she doesn't get the numbers, doesn't understand value, this is why they don't compete, it's jealousy, etc., are things she's simply not talking about, things that are irrelevant, a different subject.
The subject she is talking about is whether these are pro teams or not, whether they should be or not, what is amateurism, is this amateurism, and that these high salaries are making it hard to deny the fact that this is really a form of professional sports. What does that mean in terms of paying players etc.
Maybe she's concerned that the higher the coaching pay the more exploitative it seems considering that all that cash is there but the players don't get it while adults get rich off them. Maybe she wants that fact kept more under the radar so the scam can continue, maybe she's on the players side and it's upsetting her because this is calling her attention to how exploitative it is?
Those are the things to wonder about or discuss or disagree with or agree with or argue for or against in relation to her comments. The responses to her simply don't make any sense.
My various comments that also aren't addressing her points and potential points are mostly in response to the comments, not to her. But also to things that logically follow or interrelate to her topic such as player pay.
October 8th, 2015 at 10:51 PM ^
I like how overpaid executives are mad that other employees are overpaid
???
October 8th, 2015 at 10:55 PM ^
October 8th, 2015 at 11:35 PM ^
"The market" doesn't adequately explain or justify the values of the contracts these coaches have. In fact, if the stories in "Endzone" are true, "the market" didn't even get a chance to determine Harbaugh's value: there's a possibility he left a higher NFL salary on the table. We'll never know.
Markets break down in their explanatory power when you have such situations where the good is scarce or unique, there are few buyers and they have varying ability to pay and varying criteria for judging value, and importantly, where the money at play is being extracted from a third party without a direct say in the transaction: the big schools are in effect playing with mad money, TV revenue, which isn't exactly earned in free market conditions. This is more of an arms race, not a free market.
This woman may come across as an idiot but there is a valid point there: both UM and tOSU could hire very good coaches for less money, maybe not see the same results but good results, enough to keep us happy and tickets selling, but they decided to enter the arms race because they can afford to.
October 9th, 2015 at 1:07 AM ^
I respectfully disagree with your last paragraph. Who, exactly, was Michigan going to bring in and right the ship? And let's be perfectly honest here, after that 5-7 shit show the last coaching staff put up, plus the attrition in the offseason (which would have been horrendous), 3-4 wins this year was a distinct possibility.
I believe there was no other hire, no other person who could possibly repair the damage to the brand immediately the way Harbaugh has. Hire lesser coaches for what? 1-3 million less who would need another 3-4 years to implement their "brand" of football? The fanbase was truly at the breaking point. Very few people were ready to stomach another rebuilding process. Just look at the attendance from last year and cut it in half and you'd have this year had they hired anyone else. The new coach would have had to rebuild the fanbase, not just the team.
Kids growing up now, and ones who will be recruits in a few years have never seen what most of us grew up loving. The brand means nothing to them because they've seen one good team...maybe two since they were born. A decade of irrelevance.
Had they gone for a smaller hire, the revenue streams may have been irevocably broken with any other hire while Michigan would have been set to rebuild again. Living in San Diego, I remember when I used to be able to walk into any sports store and buy Michigan gear. Now? You can't find it anywhere.
Harbaugh is worth whatever they're paying him and probably much more. For what he will and is bringing back to Michigan from a purely economic standpoint. Asses in the seats, merc sales, eyeballs to the television sets, and alumni pride (and donations).
October 9th, 2015 at 6:36 AM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 6:36 AM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 7:18 PM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 1:05 PM ^
TV stations or networks don't pay any part of Harbaugh's salary, as far as I can tell.
And you might want to look up "markets" before you argue that the compenation of Harbaugh (or any other of "these coaches") isn't driven or explained by the market.
October 8th, 2015 at 11:41 PM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 12:11 AM ^
Thanks Obama...
October 9th, 2015 at 1:29 AM ^
is different than being a market participant, which she is today. And she seems to be having a bit of a time figuring that out.
October 9th, 2015 at 3:49 AM ^
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October 9th, 2015 at 8:16 AM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 10:38 AM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 1:07 PM ^
No, it doesn't. It is completely silent.
October 9th, 2015 at 9:52 AM ^
because it became political.
October 9th, 2015 at 10:41 AM ^
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October 9th, 2015 at 7:16 PM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 11:52 AM ^
Many here are responding to the Chancellor's comments from a perspective of cash value. I think she really was talking about value systems, not the dollar figures themselves.
In other words, she does not like a value system that leads to (in this case) football coaches making many millions of dollars a year. Coaches get paid that kind of money because we as consumers really like the product, watch the show, buy the merchandise, etc., and the money flows to the coaches. And, as much as I love Michigan sports and the continuing connection it gives me since graduation, in reality, the games themselves have no actual meaning to my life other than a dviersionary enjoyment.
Now, given that our society does value such a system, I think the money Harbaugh and Meyer gets paid is just fine.
October 9th, 2015 at 7:14 PM ^
October 9th, 2015 at 12:51 PM ^
If paying millions for a coach is unreasonable why doesn't Wisconsin set the bar and cap coaching salaries at their professor equivalents?
Never mind, they won't do that...
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October 9th, 2015 at 7:09 PM ^