According to Florida Today, “But any time you turn over more money to a coach in the middle of economic crisis, it doesn’t look good.”

Doesn’t look good? Who cares? Good leaders shouldn’t.

Florida’s Urban Meyer deserves a raise, and those who worry about the public image need to stop running a multimillion dollar organization through opinion polls.

Florida’s athletic director Jeremy Foley has one real job—make sure the budget balances, and preferably grows. To make that happen, the athletic director has a relatively small core of people to please, fans who buy tickets and Florida merchandise. What is the key demand of this demographic? Winning.

Why winning? Because it is fun. Alabama fans enjoyed most of 2008, but didn’t enjoy 2006 very much. Do we really need more proof? Winning is fun. We know that a priori.

There is an ancillary group the Florida athletic department needs to please—television executives. However, what pleases television executives is the same thing that pleases fans. Winning. There are other things television executives like too. Having a personality like Steve Spurrier, or being a dumbass like Lane Kiffin are helpful to ratings. However, winning is the most important thing to getting viewers.

Does anyone remember the ratings from the SEC Championship game between #1 Alabama and #2 Florida? The game drew a 9.3 rating, and was viewed in 15.3 million homes.

Winning is good for business. SEC athletic department budgets are soaring across the conference.

If you have one of the best coaches in college football, it would be foolish to risk losing him to appease some assistant professor over in the English department. You can’t put at risk millions in profit to keep Luddites, socialists, women’s studies professors and Florida State fans content. Good leaders can look past the criticism of rivals. Good leaders ignore opinion polls and do the right thing for the organization.

Faculty worried about the message of giving Meyer a raise while faculty members suffer in a down economy should examine how things work on a college campus. There already is a disparity in pay. When I was in college, one of my astronomy professors admitted he supplemented his salary through research grants. It was a competitive process that brought him extra dollars. He said it paid his summer salary. He was blunt about why this was important; every extra dollar he earned via research grants helped him now and increased his retirement. Even life in the Academy isn’t fair.

How can we expect big business like college football to be fair?

We can’t. We shouldn’t. It is business. Some people are better at it than others. It isn’t fair, but it is what it is. And thank God for it.

7 thoughts on “Urban Meyer deserves a raise”

  1. I agree. His salary should rival Saban’s. He’s an outstanding coach, and even though I can’t say he’s the best coach in the SEC (because I’m a ‘Bama fan), I can say he’s the second-best coach. 😀 Sorry Spurrier, but SC isn’t doing you any good. You’ve lost your luster there.

  2. You get what you pay for. How much revenue has Meyer increased for the Florida budget going back to Zook ? I believe hes earned his salary and then some. He should be making more than any other CFB coach in the country. If he wins the BCS for the third time in three years this year and isnt the top paid coach in the country, its an outrage. How many 2 time BCS title winners are there actively coaching ? Not Carroll . Not Brown. Not Saban. Not Stoops. Not Spurrier. Dang sure not Weiss. I cant think of any …..Maybe Im drawing a blank…….

  3. Sorry….third time in 4 years.

  4. It makes sense both in terms of economics for the athletic association and with regard to the coaching market. It’s a no brainer. Anyone who says otherwise just doesn’t have the facts.

  5. “We know that a priori.”

    Don’t you mean a posteriori? A posteriori is knowledge from experience, a prior is knowledge independent of experience, or am I missing something here?

  6. I kind of mean we know that without needing any evidence, yet I cited evidence anyway.

    Poorly constructed paragraph on my part. Especially since the construct of winning is experiential knowledge and not something we would be able to know outside of our experience.

  7. Amen Brother !!

    I didn’t hear the University turn down the 6 million that the athletic association donated to the school last year.

    This is just one more artificial political correctness ploy in the Era of whiners(liberals) who find it easier to take from those who have earned their raises than to actually put forth the effort to compete in an open market.

    Who cares what professors who work 12 hours a week (on a tough week)and have 2 months off in the summer to take their sabaticals at the State’s expense. They are just Hypocritical whiners.

    Pay the man !!!!!

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