REhawk's supremely noble sentiment of the amount that top college coaches are paid being "socially" wrong, or hard to justify on a social level left me pondering that concept...
Hasnt this whole thing been discussed ad nauseum over the last 30+ yrs in the sports world, regarding BIG money salaries & contracts???
Personally, a business or CEO/ owner can do whatever he/she wants with THEIR money, from signing a coach or player to mkt-competetive salary, OR donating a chunk to their charity of choice. This is nothing but business world reality. Has nothing, I mean nothing to do with starving kids in India or Guatemala or right here in the USA.
One can earn a Ph.D in studying Sociology, but then...that degree wouldnt give them any foundation in understanding market forces & business entities seeking a competetive advantage.
I find it hard to think that most sports-aware American adults dont already appreciate how BIG business the NFL and NCAA are. The kicker is: its ALL supported by millions of people with their TV, mdse, and ticket dollars. Sorry, but mostly, sociology all boils down to people making choices...on either side of the equation.
From a business standpoint, do you think KY ADept & BigBlue Nation fans are happy with their money spent to pay Calipari??
Why did Zenger ink Self last yr to a 10-yr, $52mil deal?
And for any that dont know, this is NOT public state monies--> no way KY or KS legislatures would be able to justify that, while the amount of people on state govt assistance grows daily...All the money KUADept or KY Athlet.Dept has is generated by their own hot-commodity revenue.
Not to digress too much, but people who wish to lobby the govt hard for social change are almost naively misguided. Such lobbyists need to be making appts with Koch brothers and with NFL owners and other huge business enterprises...the govt has enough challenges, and frankly, puts the "squeeze" (taxes incr.) on those same entities, right??? And the social lobbyists maybe need to do ad-campaigns asking the American public at large to make different choices with their money , & see if donating to the poor/needy competes with NFL/NCAA?
Not hard stuff, conceptually, but whats hard is the harsh reality of just how much money the vast majority of sports-loving American public spends to support their teams. That's harsh reality for those people who'd like to totally change or impact this world on the social level. They need to take Economics101 & realize basic innate facts about human wants/desires, then add on top of that human competetiveness, & how sports allows for a vibrant & vicarious expression of our competetiveness. A lot of primitive, innate human qualities are satisfied thru sports: cliquishness, us vs them, want what they have, territoriality, battling one another--This stuff goes back to hunter-gatherer days or this klan vs that klan. So my point is, social lobbyists have to realize what they are up against, before looking naively at 2 concepts that have nothing to do with each other. Illogical link. I consider even this post of mine to be partly wasted time, but I put this out there because I'm old enough to have seen this get discussed over the decades, that Im sure there's young Jayhawks wondering the same thing ReHawk was alluding to.
Cliff Notes version: choices, choices, choices. But see the "choices" the American public keeps making. Think about it, make up your own minds.
I thank ReHawk for bringing the concept to light, hopefully promotes deeper thinking by all. RCJH.
