The Perks of Coaching

By JENNIFER JACOBSON

It's good to be a University of Nebraska coach, an assistant athletics director, or an employee in the sports-information department. Not only do they rub shoulders with the football players who are the gods of Nebraska's state religion, they are also accorded certain courtesies, such as cars provided by local dealers who are fans of Cornhusker sports teams.

Dealers, in turn, are able to purchase hard-to-come-by basketball and football tickets. The latter have been sold out for 255 consecutive games, and season tickets have been sold out since the 1960s, according to Steve Pederson, Nebraska's athletics director.

Mr. Pederson drives a dealer-provided 2004 Chevy Tahoe, while his wife, Tami, drives a dealer-provided 2003 GMC Envoy. Three other spouses -- the wife of the head coach of men's basketball, the husband of the head coach of women's basketball, and the wife of the head football coach -- also drive dealer cars.

The perquisites for Mr. Pederson's employees don't end with the cars. Nearly 40 of them also enjoy free country-club memberships at the Yankee Hill Country Club and the Firethorn Golf Club, both in Lincoln. Yankee Hill has a golf course, a 40,000-square-foot clubhouse, and an Olympic-size swimming pool, while the Firethorn features the usual 18 holes.

Professors at Nebraska and elsewhere may get tenure, but they rarely receive such elaborate perks. They don't have valuable things to trade, like tickets to games, for free cars and pricey country-club memberships. Head coaches, assistant coaches, and even athletics administrators have the tickets to make such deals and are therefore able to reap the benefits of a longstanding crony system that the academic side of the institution will never see.

"We all read about the spending on athletics at big universities, and it does appear that in many cases it is changing the priorities of these educational institutions," says Edwin H. Davis, vice president for state and field operations for Common Cause, the nonpartisan organization that lobbies for accountability in government. Perks, he says, could change an institution's priorities, as well.

"If you're providing those kinds of favors only to those involved in athletics, then you're creating incentives that favor the athletic department over the academic department," he adds. "As much as many of us are sports fans, for a public university the primary goal ought to be education."

But Wayne Hogan, athletics director at the University of Montana at Missoula, considers any discussion of the issue a dead end. "You could debate forever whether it's fair or not fair," he says. "A lot of people on the academic side are deserving of more money and accolades. They chose to do what they do because it's what they love. People who work in athletics have chosen their field because it's what they love. That's not good or bad -- just a fact of the society and culture we live in."

No NCAA Rules

While the National Collegiate Athletic Association has rules governing the perks athletes can receive, it has no regulations against coaches receiving perks, but they must report them to their institution's president, says an NCAA spokesman. So even those at universities with much lower profiles than Nebraska have their own reward systems. At Northwestern State University, in Natchitoches, La., the athletics director drives a brand-new Dodge Intrepid, two coaches receive monthly car stipends, and eight other coaches have "courtesy cars," as they're known in college athletics.

"Athletics staff and coaches do spend an inordinate amount of time away from families, on the road and at the office," says Doug Ireland, the university's sports-information director. The athletics staff members, he says, are not paid at the same rate as they would be in the corporate world or in professional sports. A perks package is "some way to provide a little additional compensation for these sacrifices that coaches and staff have to make to remain competitive in the industry," Mr. Ireland says.

Allowing the head football coach to use a dealer-provided 2004 Ford F-150, for example, also saves the program money, he says. "We don't have the resources to jump on a plane to go to Kansas to recruit," he notes. To avoid wear and tear on their own cars, coaches at Northwestern State give dealers tickets in exchange for cars. The dealers also make endorsement deals with the coaches and gain the status of being associated with a team.

Not only are such deals not available to other campus employees, but those employees rarely even know about them. At Appalachian State University, in Boone, N.C., Paul H. Gates Jr., chairman of the Faculty Senate, was surprised to find out that 18 members of the Mountaineers' athletics department drove courtesy cars. "I'm stunned," he says. "Eighteen sounds like an awful lot."

When he had accumulated 202,000 miles on his 1989 Nissan Sentra this year, Mr. Gates had to get rid of it. He now drives a 2000 Nissan Xterra. "There was no local dealer who was anxious to give the chair of the Faculty Senate a car," he says.

As for administrators outside of athletics, only the chancellor has regular access to a university-owned vehicle, Mr. Gates says, and adds that if dealers are going to give a car "to one part of the university, they should give it to all parts." But he knows that's unlikely. "It's a shame that that's the way it goes, that sports is celebrated and academics is not," he says.

And although Mr. Gates, unlike the coaches, has tenure, he doesn't view that as a perk. Tenure "is an important and integral protection that simply insulates faculty from the vagaries of politics and allows them to express themselves freely in class on topics germane to the course," he says. "A perk is a benefit on top of salary. Tenure carries with it no additional benefits beyond a modest bump in base salary."

Besides, he says, universities usually give coaches highly lucrative, long-term contracts that "more than make up for any insecurity they might feel over the possibility of being terminated for a losing season or two," Mr. Gates says. "If they are terminated, the remainder of their contract is often bought out."

But Peter P. Roby, director of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society, sees nothing wrong with perks for members of athletics departments. He says other university employees typically receive them as well. "Don't professors get preferential housing treatment when Stanford is recruiting a professor from Harvard?" he says. "You're naive if you think the only place that's happening is on the athletic side of the house."

Roachel Laney, athletics director at Appalachian, declines to reveal which coaches receive which cars. If he did, he says, it would create animosity among his staff. "I don't want to embarrass my people," he says. "I need to protect my privacy."

Reform at Kentucky

The University of Kentucky's president, Lee T. Todd Jr., considered such enhancements too generous at his institution. When he took office more than two years ago, the NCAA was investigating Kentucky's football program for rules infractions. Those infractions had nothing to do with employees' exchanging tickets for cars, but Mr. Todd thought that the practice needed reform.

Accountants and computer specialists in the department were receiving cars just like some of the coaches. Those people "don't need cars for recruiting purposes," Mr. Todd says. As for the coaches, they, too, traded tickets for cars, he says, and "that didn't feel right."

Since the university had no policy on the matter, Mr. Todd and a committee he established decided to provide cars only to employees who had that perquisite written into their contracts. Mr. Todd and the committee also required that all cars be purchased through the university's purchasing department, he says, which can exchange tickets for cars or simply pay to lease them.

Last year Mr. Todd made the new policy official: Thirty-nine cars, down from 51, are available for the university's head coaches, as well as for the athletics director and the associate athletics director for development. Other staff members are no longer permitted to trade tickets for cars.

Before Mr. Todd became president, some coaches and the athletics director enjoyed country-club memberships. Today, those deals are only for the athletics director and the head football and men's basketball coaches. Fifteen memberships in the University Club (a privately owned golf club where Kentucky golf teams play) are also available to members of the athletics department, as are another 15 memberships to other university clubs.

Mr. Todd says he did not do away with perks entirely, because head coaches in Division I have come to expect them.

Nebraska's Mr. Pederson says coaches and athletics directors deserve perks. That's why his university has a Wheel Club, in which 92 employees in the athletics department drive dealer-provided cars and 37 receive country-club memberships.

By loaning cars, dealers are able to purchase basketball and football tickets, although not at reduced prices, Mr. Pederson says.

An assistant athletics director in the department assigns cars to senior members of the athletics staff, and those employees pay for their car insurance, maintenance, and income tax on the value of the vehicles, Mr. Pederson says. They use a university credit card to pay for gas used on business and their own money to pay for personal use of the vehicle, he says.

The university offers cars to employees and even spouses "as one of the benefits of working here," Mr. Pederson says. It "also helps keep our salaries at a reasonable range ... rather than just paying people more money."

But Nebraska paid its 82 coaches a total of $4-million in 2001-2, the fourth-highest compensation in the Big 12 Conference, according to reports published under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act.

Jack Gould, a volunteer with Common Cause Nebraska, tracks university employees' perks and dislikes the idea of perks for athletics-department personnel, especially for their spouses. "Why would the football coach's wife have a car?" he says. "Does that have anything to do with education or even the football program?"

Mr. Pederson contends that athletics programs must offer such perks to attract not only top coaches but also talented athletes. "Coaches picking up kids at the airport in a nice vehicle, that projection of the image of a first-class university" shows that Nebraska is always putting its best foot forward, he says.

Anyway, Mr. Pederson says, professors get perks that no one objects to. "My people aren't writing books," he says. If a professor "writes a book and makes a lot of money off the sale of the book in the bookstore, we don't really care. We think that's great for them."

Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education