Cash football playoff

When all is said and done after Monday night’s college football championship, two things are certain: One of two Tigers — either defending champion Clemson or challenger LSU — will reign supreme. And while the student-athletes on the field will get lots of attaboys, the coaching staffs at the two supposedly amateur programs will roll in the dough.

The staffs of the two programs earn a combined $27 million, per the Washington Post. Head coaches Dabo Swinney of Clemson and Ed Orgeron of LSU rake in $9.3 million and $4 million alone. We remind you: These are state schools, subsidized by Louisiana and South Carolina tax dollars, not to mention tuition payments and federal funding.

College football and basketball coaches are the top-paid public employees in 39 of 50 states. Just gross.

We resist calls to send college football players paychecks. That would create a twotier world in which a few youngsters in big-time programs get big bucks, while thousands of other student-athletes accept that scholarships are appropriate compensation.

But there are other ways to fix what has become an obscenely out-of-whack playing field. Last spring, California passed a smart law requiring all its schools to allow scholarship athletes the right to be compensated for their own name, image or likeness. So offended was Swinney, he suggested he might quit coaching.

He and other overpaid coaches should have the good sense to shut their yaps. And the NCAA, which finally changed its rules to mimic California’s, should cap coach pay. Then use the overflowing cash to fund more academic scholarships for low-income kids who struggle to pay for college.