2011 NCAA women thread ... better late than never?

Nikki Caldwell, who has yet to coach a game at LSU, is making almost a million a year to coach women's basketball there. That's far more than Paul Mainieri is paid to coach baseball, a sport he led to a national championship in 2009. Baseball typically turns a modest profit at LSU. Women's basketball loses money.

 

Actually, they are. Every public school is doing just that. Read the Bloomberg article.

They are paying these coaches huge money, and and the women's programs are flowing pigs of red ink.

 

Maybe so. Good work on your end, LTL.

But wouldn't the women's basketball coach be one of the top positions for women's athletics in the department in most places? I guess volleyball and softball could contend for this honor at some Pac-10 and other west-coast-based schools ... someone else with a stronger background there could clarify.

But if it's as irrelevant as poin thinks, then why are more women's coaches being fired than ever? Expectations. The bottom line. If the sport were as unimportant as poin is trying to tell us, that wouldn't be happening. There would be far fewer firings, and more of them would have to do with scandal or deliberate breaching of NCAA rules and regulations, not because the team didn't win enough.

 

I think it's hard for people to take NCAA economics seriously. On one hand, they're eager to flaunt the billions they make from the basketball and football contracts. On the other, they're quick to cry poverty when it comes to the suggestion of paying athletes, or financing the less glamorous sports. It kind of reminds me of pro sports ownership - MLB owners plead poverty, yet whenever a team goes up to be sold, there is plenty of interest, and no one is willing to crack open the books.

 

Oh, women's basketball would be the top spot. It's just that it the sport holds little appeal to the students, alumni or general public, so it doesn't make any money. There's a vocal lobby that believes the women's basketball coach has to make more because the football and men's basketball coaches make more. But in football and men's basketball the salary bears some relationship to the value they bring to the university. The women's basketball coach is a beneficiary of the academic setting, where professors and administrators make more because they "deserve" more, regardless of whether that can be demonstrated and even if it can be demonstrated that the opposite is true.

 

Using that argument, then the coaches at UConn, Stanford, Duke, et al. should be paid even more. After all, their importance to the sport, relative to the rest of Division I, is astronomical. As such, they should get astronomical salaries.

 

I don't really understand your argument, because if they were personally important to the sport -- rather than simply coaching the best teams, which there's always going to be a best team -- then there would be growth and prosperity that we could attribute to them. So they don't really have "astronomical" importance, since the game's financial losses are expanding. But the lobby has done a nice job getting salaries to a level where a mid-range big-conference coach can expect to make at least a half-million dollars a year regardless of whether the program is an asset or a drain on the athletic department's budget.

 

They're not personally important to the sport?

Also, I don't have UConn's books right here in front of me, but I would speculate the UConn women's program does not contribute significantly to the flow of red ink.

 

UConn is one of the few exceptions, as is Tennessee. I'd be surprised if there are a whole lot of others.

But getting back to my first post on the thread: Skylar Diggins, hot or not? Hot, I say.

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-01/women-s-basketball-teams-operate-in-red-as-salaries-break-college-budgets.html

You didn't ever RTFA.

The University of Connecticut’s run at a third consecutive women’s championship comes with the trappings of a world-class sports event, including a national television audience and rowdy fans in blue wigs and face paint.

The Huskies dominate on the court, and can sell out arenas. What they lose is money. The program spent $723,900 more than it earned in fiscal 2010.

Define "significantly".

 

The University of Tennessee, ranked fourth in the Associated Press Top 25, lost $713,997

 

Well, now that opens my eyes. Thanks poin. Geez, if they can't make money right now, it isn't ever going to be possible for women's basketball.