January 2, 2005

Big Boosters Calling the Shots on Campus

HERE is a sticker price for a messiah coach. For $16 million, the University of Florida recently banished Ron Zook with a $1.8 million buyout, paid the Utah Utes what amounted to a savior transfer fee of $250,000 and committed $14 million over seven years for Urban Meyer to compete with Steve Spurrier's visorly ghost.

Then the salary cloning began. Now there are messiahs everywhere, with Mack Brown on the verge of receiving a 10-year, $26 million validation hug from Texas, with Auburn's Tommy Tuberville agreeing to a $16 million makeup kiss after boosters plotted to fire him last season, with each man joining nearly a dozen others in the expanding $2 million club of college football coaches.

The excessive trash of the "College Coeds Gone Wild" video has been exceeded by the obscene state spending of "College Caretakers Gone Loony."

Were the Gators the careless triggermen or innocent market victims?

"I'm sure some will say Florida is the cause," Florida's athletic director, Jeremy Foley, said in a telephone interview, "but Florida didn't set the marketplace."

Was it Notre Dame? The leprechauns were desperately pursuing Meyer with a pot of gold. Was it Louisiana State? The Tigers had established the bar with an $18.45 million deal for Nick Saban only to see him jilt them for a $22.5 million deal in the N.F.L.

Was it Bob Stoops? He sends the Sooners into bake-sale mode every time he winks at another suitor.

The culprit is not the obvious. On the surface, the spiraling salaries seem like a clairvoyant snapshot of the foreboding "arms race" passage authored by the deep thinkers behind the 2001 Knight Commission report.

"Something similar is happening that is more insidious: expectations," Myles Brand, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, said when reached at his office. "In a number of our major institutions with large athletic departments, expectations have become unsustainable."

This pressure is from within. The collegiate marketplace is set by insider ego, the business model operates on the fickleness of rah-rah and athletic departments have become the pawns of chief executive war games.

This is the era of the über-booster. So it's worth asking any messiah coach: who's your sugar daddy?

The most meddling of the boosters aren't the cheap-suit fans tailgating on the back of a Ford pickup; some are Forbes-list executives buying vicarious ownership of their college teams.

Their power to shape a hiring, a firing - and, in some cases, play calling - is the hobgoblin of financial dependency. With broadcast revenue peaking for athletic departments but with salaries expanding, boosters have gladly picked up more of the tab in a bottomless money pit.

In 1997, Gator Boosters Inc. raised $16.2 million in contributions, according to its 990 tax filing, a form used by nonprofit organizations. In 2002, it brought in $23.7 million in public support - or more than a third of Florida's athletic budget.

Many variables influence giving, but Florida State may provide the most direct link between winning and wealth, pride and pocketbook. In the year before Florida State won the 1999 national title, Seminole Boosters Inc. recorded $16.6 million in support. In 2000, contributions jumped to $31.4 million.

What athletic director wouldn't want to please the very folks who are supplementing his salary and the income of coaches while financing scholarships, stadium improvements and recruiting trips, and upgrading cheerleader megaphones?

"The expectations of boosters and trustees are pushing athletic directors for a larger and larger rate of increase in expenditures," Brand said. "And that's where they are getting in trouble."

Some athletic czars are being devoured by their own design. At one point, setting up athletic departments and booster groups as separate nonprofit 501C3 charities seemed ingenious at universities like Clemson, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana State, Florida State and, most recently, Auburn.

As if athletic departments weren't already isolated from the university, with athletes existing in their own cultures. As if the greatest charity cause wasn't already luxury-suite lighting, with education as an afterthought. Fans were given a chance to dial-a-donation.

Why give to a university's general fund if you don't care a lick about how many cadavers the science labs have? Why pay for orchestra flutes when you can help develop the next Doug Flutie? Incorporating the booster clubs as fund-raising arms for athletics provided friends of the program a tax break, as well as ticket priorities, parking passes and foam index fingers that indicate "We're No. 1."

Never mind what this victory-obsessed culture says about society's feel-good-by-crushing-others mentality. As Pierre Ramond, a physics professor and faculty chairman at Florida, wistfully recalled, going to a Gators football game used to be "kind of a quaint, a fun outing, but that was many, many years ago."

There is nothing quaint about the current corporate booster structure. Many of the presidents and officers report six-figure incomes. The president of Seminole Boosters received $221,241 in compensation, according to the organization's 2002 990 tax form.

Booster power only creates ambiguity about who is in charge of the program.

"There is room for problems there, and in some cases, there are problems," Brand said.

Some incorporated clubs give a lump sum to athletic departments without any directive as to how it is to be spent; the Gator Boosters director, John James, says that is how his organization operates.

Other booster groups funnel money as they like. Peek inside some of the 990 tax forms and you'll find autonomy's splendor: In 2002, Louisiana State's Tiger Athletic Foundation paid Saban Enterprises LLC $290,000 for consultant work and provided unspecified coaches with $650,000 in supplements; in 2002, the Ole Miss Loyalty Foundation Inc. directly compensated the football coach David Cutcliffe $737,625, the basketball coach Rod Barnes $585,000 and the athletic director John Shafer $100,000.

Coaches at public universities may seem like state employees, but unofficially they are the kept men of the private donors, particularly of those who give up to seven figures a year to the programs. Some contributors are more than boosters; they are powerful trustees who mistake their gifts for entitlement.

Bobby Lowder fits this profile. He is the Auburn trustee and booster whose plane was used in the infamous tarmac scandal that nearly resulted in Tuberville's firing last season. As the wealthy chief of the Alabama-based Colonial Bank, Lowder has been known to give millions to the athletic department. Months after the scandal, he donated $4.2 million, the largest single gift made to the Auburn athletic department, to finance the student-athlete development center. The contribution made his $600,000 check in 2003 to Tigers Unlimited - Auburn's booster club - seem like ashtray change.

Vicarious access to the program isn't cheap. Some trustees turned boosters - or vice versa - will meddle whatever the cost.

"Some trustees, a minority, have wanted to gain influence over athletic department decisions," Brand said, adding that whoever the donor is, "sometimes, you can't afford the gift because there are too many strings attached."

Before the first coin toss of a Bowl Championship Series game, 20 of 117 Division I-A programs had changed coaches, leading to this question: As salaries expand, as leashes shorten, who pays the severance deals?

On its 2002 990 tax form, Seminole Boosters reported $260,000 to buy out coaches' contracts. If Meyer doesn't work out in three years as the Gators' chosen one, somebody will have to absorb the balance on the $14 million owed to him.

In the coming years, powerful booster clubs will bear the burden of their own making in an arms race fueled by their outsized expectations in a ludicrous cycle no one seems able to stop. Presidents and athletic directors seem helpless, rendering the Knight Commission report a romantic, idealist piece of paper disconnected from reality.

University presidents like Michigan's Mary Sue Coleman haven't given up. She has turned down excessive commercialism and gifts with contingencies, bucking the trend of incorporating booster clubs. Even so, Coleman, a member of the 2001 Knight Commission, understands the pressure her peers face.

"I think we're in a circumstance where we can't figure out how to deal with salaries because there are forces out there that, when a single institution is making a decision on hiring a coach, and knowing what the marketplace is, what decision are they making?" Coleman said. "I don't think they're going back to the Knight Commission report and reflecting on it."

If presidents are struggling for control, if the N.C.A.A. is legally helpless to rein in salaries, the chance of financial chaos at some institutions isn't that far-fetched.

"I don't think we'll have an Armageddon," Brand said, "I don't think we'll explode, but I think there will come a realization that institutions can no longer" operate in a professional football market.

Brand added: "In football, with coaches' salaries, it's interesting, coaches and their agents have essentially extended the market. So now the market doesn't include just college coaches, but N.F.L. coaches. That larger market involves larger compensation packages. In this, so comes the rules that are governing the N.F.L. coaches, and that's win or get out."

Ron Zook was tossed out of the Swamp. And for that, he will collect $1.8 million from Florida, in addition to a $1 million salary from his new employer, Illinois.

One program's failure is another university's messiah at a sticker price set by the sugar daddies of athletics: the über-booster.

E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com