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It’s A Nice Racket

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Clearly, it is absolutely inconceivable that an NCAA program could compensate its players fairly:

The Alabama coaching staff got paid today, with head coach Nick Saban scheduled to make $11.125 million next season and vaulting him past Jim Harbaugh to become the highest paid coach in college football. Alabama’s defensive coordinator got a $300,000 raise, and athletic director Greg Byrne will make $900,000 next year. That’s good money for an AD but, curiously, it’s $50,000 less than outside linebackers coach Tosh Lupoi will earn.

Lupoi seems to be a very talented coach, but he isn’t becoming one of the highest paid assistant coaches in the country next year because he’s a defensive wizard or anything like that. Lupoi’s role on the Alabama coaching staff is to serve as the program’s star recruiter. Saban is the face of Alabama football and he has a penchant for, say, taking a helicopter to visit a recruit, but Lupoi is one of the most proven recruiters in the nation. He started out as the defensive line coach at Cal, his alma mater, and he helped bring in a series of future NFL players, including Keenan Allen, Richard Rodgers, and Cameron Jordan. He won Scout.com’s National Recruiter of the Year award in 2010, then left Cal two years later for a big payday at Washington, taking Shaq Thompson with him and ripping apart what would have been Cal’s best-ever recruiting class.

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Lupoi is certainly one of the best in the nation at his job, but his hefty raise also crystallizes a lot of what makes the NCAA scam so gross. Legislators arguing that paying athletes will cost them money, rich university presidents defending the sanctity of the “student athlete” model, and athletic directors flailing desperately to cling to their cushy gigs in the multi-billion dollar NCAA pyramid scheme are all perfectly illustrative examples of the sham of amateurism, but nothing feels as direct as a linebackers coach raking in nearly $1 million to convince high school athletes to come work for free at Alabama.

It’s not just that paying players, or even allowing them to accept third-party compensation like any other student, would destroy the Noble Ideals of Amateurism. It would also destroy the robust competitive balance of NCAA football. The top schools would have a yooge edge in recruiting. Indeed, you might even end up with the same teams in the national championship game in consecutive years! Surely we must tolerate any level of exploitation to avoid this fate.

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