Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards may be paying for his own flight next time he wants to see the LSU football team play an away game.
Edwards traveled with the team to last season’s Tennessee game, but the LSU athletic department may decide to purchase one less plane ticket after Edwards criticized the “obscene” salaries of coaching staffs around the country.
In last week’s meeting with The Advocate’s editorial board, Edwards suggested placing limits on what college coaches can make to halt what he considers an “arms race” among universities with regard to athletic spending.
“I do think that there has to be some look nationally at some sort of salary caps for the organizations,” Edwards told The Advocate’s Ross Dellenger.
There are two major problems with Edwards’s position, the first being legality. Placing caps on NCAA staff salaries would be a violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act and is, therefore, illegal.
This interpretation of the Sherman Act was used by several coaches to win a challenge in the 1998 decision Law v. NCAA. In this case, the coaches claimed an NCAA rule that restricted one coach’s salary to $16,000 was a violation of the Sherman Act, and the U.S. Court of Appeals agreed. The NCAA has not had a salary cap since.
I find it odd that Edwards, a graduate of LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center, is unaware of the applications of such a landmark statute like the Sherman Act, but maybe his class was forced to skip that chapter due to a lack of funding. After all, taxpayer dollars have to be divvied up between academics and athletics, right?
Wrong.
LSU is one of several universities in the country where the athletic department operates via the use of private funds from organizations like the Tiger Athletic Foundation rather than receiving a state subsidy.
To his credit, Edwards did acknowledge the fact that taxpayer dollars don’t end up in coach Ed Orgeron’s pocket, so I suspect the salary cap remarks were a way of deflecting pressure from the state’s looming budget crisis.
The Louisiana State Legislature will have to vote on a number of spending cuts in order to meet the budget’s billion dollar shortfall, and LSU’s athletic department spending millions of dollars on coaching salaries is not a good look.
Truth should be more important than optics though, and the bottom line is the state and University’s budgets don’t suffer from a coach’s multi-million dollar paycheck.
In fact, athletic departments have an opportunity to be extremely beneficial to their respective academic institutions.
As Dellenger’s article points out, LSU’s athletic department has made a total contribution of $50 million to academics in the last five years.
Of course, there are abuses in the NCAA system. A 2016 report by The Chronicle of Higher Education claims the academic sides of schools see less than $1 for every $100 made in athletic revenues, and many of these schools are subsidized by taxpayers and students.
However, using this problem as a smokescreen for Louisiana’s budget crisis is a weak attempt at best, especially given the unique way LSU’s athletic department operates.
I’m sure the NCAA was elated to receive financial advice from a Louisiana politician though. It was truly an instance of the deaf leading the blind.
