Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

market forces also determine CEO salaries

Not really. A theoretical market requires unlimited buyers and sellers bidding. A company like the NYSE does a good job simulating one, but once you get to the back-slapping/rubber-stamping/cult of personality world of board room politics, the market-in-theory no longer exists.

For comparison, I tried researching minor league baseball coach salaries (which would more closely reflect the market) but came up dry. I'm guessing 100K tops, and probably less. The prices relating to college football are propped up just by being officially part of college and the environment.

I don't remember a single person talking about minor league baseball during college, and the same would have been true of football if its professional proving-grounds were the minor leagues rather than universities. Too bad.

That's absurd. I'd be willing to wager big school football makes orders of magnitude more than minor league baseball, hence the coaches do as well.

I'd be willing to wager that football, set up like minor league baseball, would make roughly the same as minor league baseball, or worse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFL

The XFL had a lot of problems, but very few were related to the business structure.

The biggest problem was that the best players in the world weren't playing in the XFL. Div I-A college football doesn't have that problem. The lower divisions do, though. I doubt many Div I-AA or Div II coaches are making $1MM.

That doesn't make any sense at all.

College football programs rake in huge money, and therefore the people responsible for their success do too, whereas minor league baseball teams do not, and therefore their coaches don't.

They rake in huge revenue, but most programs are in the red. Former UMich president James Duderstadt wrote a book (Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University) where he claimed that the reported profits for most college football teams are bs, and in several supposedly-profitable Rose Bowl seasons, the Wolverines lost millions. Mostly the teams get so much $$ based on perceived (yet statistically negligible) alumni donation increases based on a team's success.

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