Columnist Simonich says UNM athletics doesn’t deserve more of taxpayers’ cash
Legend has it that baseball star Babe Ruth felt justified in making more money than President Herbert Hoover in 1930, during the Great Depression.
“I had a better year than Mr. Hoover,” Ruth supposedly said.
It was a good line. More important, Ruth’s earning power signaled how the U.S. marketplace would operate.
Salaries in the world of entertainment would exceed salaries in the real world. And in Ruth’s era, the White House was still part of the real world.
Now a second-string running back in the National Football League makes millions of dollars a season while the country’s best public school teachers don’t approach six figures a year. That’s life in America. A skilled entertainer commands top dollar, or close to it.
But today there is a disturbing twist on this rule of economics.
Regents of the University of New Mexico want the Legislature to allocate an additional $1.5 million for the school’s intercollegiate sports programs. This would increase taxpayers’ direct contribution to UNM sports to more than $4 million annually.
The regents are up to no good. They want to squeeze more money from essential programs to help finance UNM athletics, which fall into the category of entertainment.
Sure, the regents are seeking just a sliver of the state’s $6 billion budget for their jockocracy, but their idea is still odious.
UNM athletic director Eddie Nuñez receives $300,000 a year to fill stadiums with ticket-buying fans.
Men’s basketball coach Paul Weir makes more than $600,000 in base pay and side deals. And football coach Bob Davie has a total package worth in excess of $800,000 a year.
The idea of UNM athletic programs receiving additional public funding is impossible to justify, given the salaries of these gents overseeing campus entertainment.
Plus, the football and basketball programs are supposed to pay for UNM sports that don’t generate much revenue. This isn’t happening, so the regents want a bailout from taxpayers.
Coaches at UNM will be happy to spin the regents’ proposal by claiming college sports are integral to education. That is a nice story. It’s also fiction.
Davie and Weir usually aren’t evaluated on how literate their players are. They are measured by how many games they win or lose.
Coaches who lose get fired, especially in Division I programs, the top rung of competition.
Some coaches care deeply about education. One is Lou Tepper, a football coach I came to know.
Tepper was head coach at the University of Illinois, where he ran a clean program and made sure his players got an education.
But Illinois fired Tepper after his record slipped to 25-31-2 in five seasons. Had he won more games with renegade players, the way Florida State often did, he would have kept his job longer.
Davie has been more fortunate than Tepper and many others. Davie has a checkered history in coaching, but his career included five seasons as head coach of storied Notre Dame.
This pedigree helped him obtain the coaching job at New Mexico, where he makes more money than the university president.
Given the salaries of Davie, Weir and Nuñez, lawmakers should laugh the regents right out of the Capitol for seeking a larger subsidy for sports programs.
Just last year, the Legislature swiped a total of $40 million from public school districts to help pay the state’s bills. This was the fallout from a weak state economy, along with Republican Gov. Susana Martinez and legislators of both parties recklessly cutting corporate taxes.
After legislators raided the reserve accounts of school districts, a state District Court judge ruled that New Mexico is not meeting its constitutionally mandated responsibility to adequately fund public schools.
It is unacceptable to spend more of taxpayers’ money on university athletic programs while undernourished parts of government scrape by.
Big-time college sports haven’t been about education since at least 1939, if then. That was when the University of Chicago dropped out of the Big Ten Conference. Its president believed a school committed to academics did not belong in a league where football was so important.
Not another penny of public money should go to UNM sports programs. At least not until Nuñez, Weir and Davie accept 50 percent pay cuts.
A lighter paycheck might reacquaint them with the real world. That’s a place entertainers seldom frequent.