I think the broader point for the HN crowd is this is a great example of why you want to be part of a profit center instead of a cost center in a business. If it's easy for management to try a direct line from incoming revenue to the work you do (like a sales person or, in this case, a football coach), you are in a great negotiating position. If you are in a cost center, management will do everything possible to reduce your salary, even if it the grand scheme of things that cost center is critical to running the business.

The irony is that the people who do the central work for the business, academics at the University, engineers designing the next products, even factory workers often are often cost centres. This leads to the somewhat perverse insentive to remove more and more of your central workers to hire managers and administrators.

One can also try to work for companies that properly appreciate the value of all necessary components of the business, even if one can't directly tally their contribution. Most important factors to success are not easily measurable.

too much or too little?

> universities obviously benefit a lot from the revenue that sports bring in but it'd be nice to see that benefit spread a bit more evenly across professors

Professors can't do what he does: bring in big-ticket spending, sponsorships and donations.

This is true - but professors provide the real value that students retain over time - so admissions fees should pretty much all be funneled to them. This is a problem with how hard to market the value professors provide is - a lot of admissions care more about a good sports team than a good set of professors even though the later factor will be much more important to them two years in.

Basically, people don't act rationally so the market is irrational.

> professors provide the real value that students retain over time - so admissions fees should pretty much all be funneled to them

I wouldn't so quickly ignore the additional tuition revenue athletics departments bring in at non-Tier 1 schools.

University athletics are a weird thing. But if the pay bothers you, think of it as a commission. Going cheap on that will likely cost more than it saves.