Nick wept

College football coaches are important people. In some states, maybe the important-est. They get paid a lot of money, so much that they are often the highest paid wage-earners in the state.

For instance, Nick Saban is the highest-paid individual in Alabama (which is not to say he makes more money per annum than anyone in Alabama, only that he’s the highest-paid person who doesn’t own the means of production) with a base pay that will come in at around $8.83 million this season. Saban also stands to make an $800,000 completion bonus, and he has an escalating “talent fee” built into his deal, so all told he’ll make around $9.9 million in 2022-23.

He’s worth it, when you consider the economic engine that is the University of Alabama Crimson Tide football team. While it’s hard to say exactly how much money the football program generates, people who analyze these things at The Wall Street Journal put a valuation of $1.01 billion on the program in 2021. (That made Alabama the third-highest valued college football program, behind the University of Texas and The Ohio State University. All three of these programs were within a few million dollars of each other.)

Look at it another way: Crimson Tide athletics (not just football) brought in $179.8 million during the 2021 fiscal year, which spanned from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021. Operating expenses were $170.2 million, which leaves a $9.6 million surplus, which we can think of as profit. That was down quite a bit because of covid-19, which was mostly responsible for a drop in ticket revenue of a little over $32 million. It’s fair to think of the 2021 fiscal year as an off year for Alabama athletics.

Now consider this: About 60 percent of that $179.8 million came from the football program. Which means, if not for football, Alabama athletics would have lost a lot of money, enough that the sustainability of a lot of programs comes into question. (The only other profitable sport at the University of Alabama was men’s basketball.)

Football really does provide a lot of opportunities for non-football-playing athletes and non-football-coaching coaches. While it’s still possible for reasonable people to have a philosophical debate about the appropriateness of having sports franchises affiliated (however loosely) with institutions of higher learning, it’s undeniable that a major college football program can be a profit center for a school.

Now let’s think about Saban’s contract and the contracts of his coaches. In 2022-23, the salaries of 10 Alabama assistant football coaches will run about $8.36 million. Two special assistants to Saban will cost another $1.145 million.

The way I figure it, in a year where revenue was off for reasons that had nothing to do with the performance of the football team’s coaching staff, the payroll (I’ve nudged it down a touch because everybody got a raise for 2022-23) for the Alabama football team was about $19 million, or about 17.6 percent of gross revenue. If you’re starting a small business, you are typically advised to budget at least 15 to 30 percent for payroll; companies that are competitive with others for talent generally spend between 40 and 80 percent of their gross revenue on salaries.

So hey, by some measures, Saban and his staff are underpaid.

On the other hand, Saban and his staff don’t really make the product. They don’t play football. And the reason they can command their salaries is because their work force is made up of volunteer indentures.

And the workers who do produce the product, well, they’re paid in what amounts to company scrip. They get a place to live. They get free meals. They get a chance to play football for the University of Alabama, which is not a worthless item to have on one’s résumé. They get a chance to get an education. No one is naive enough to believe some of them don’t occasionally shake someone’s hand and later find a collectible portrait of Ulysses S. Grant stuck ’tween their fingers.

It’s not that they’re not compensated. It’s a question of whether they are fairly compensated for their part in generating revenue for the university. There are lots of reasonable questions that can be asked. The consensus, at least among people who are not slavishly devoted to the status quo, is that the current system is inequitable, and that college athletes ought to at least be able to make money by lending their name, image and likenesses to whoever is willing to pay them for it. This has caused a disruption of business as usual in college athletics. Naturally the people who have benefited from the system—the Nick Sabans of the world—are howling about how it’s the Wild West out there and our way of life is threatened. Saban is worried that NIL is destroying “parity” in college football.

Funny, I thought destroying parity in college football was Nick Saban’s job.

His hissy fit last week—which was met with dark murmurings from Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher, who basically implied that he and lot of other coaches knew where Saban dumped the bodies—was highly entertaining if you’re the sort of person who enjoys seeing banty dudes who wouldn’t hesitate to tell Jesus Christ to cut that damn hair get their skirts blown up in public.

My expert analysis on the whole thing was that Saban was telling the Alabama boosters they’d better be prepared to step it up with the handshakes and the collectible presidents.

It’s refreshing when all that solemn sports-writery awe slides away and exposes these paragons of character who mold young men as nothing more or less than greedy nerds in quarter zips. Saban’s a good coach, better than most, and as Fisher suggests, he probably hasn’t always been a nice guy. He might be worth $10 mil a year, but only naifs look to these people for moral instruction.

The people of Alabama—who actually pay Saban’s salary—are happy to pay him. He has led the Tide to six national championships since taking over the program in 2007, including the 2020 title. Altogether Saban has won seven national championships, one better than legendary Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, who, I am contractually bound to say, was born in Moro Bottom in Cleveland County, Arkansas.

Bryant believed it was symbolically important for the school’s president to make more than the football coach, and his salary remained $1 less than the university president for his entire Alabama career.

Saban makes about 17 times more than his university president. He deserves it. Just ask him.