Mike Elko was certainly well respected for the job he did at Notre Dame, but $2,000,000 a year to coach A&M's defense is crazy. This is a continuation of the college football arms race that is going to literally bankrupt some schools and conferences. Jimbo Fisher is set to make $7,500,000 a year for the Aggies with a 10 year guaranteed contract. Can't think of the last time a college coach became the highest paid football coach coming off a 3-5 in conference schedule. I am well aware of all the injuries the Seminoles had but $75,000,000 for a ten year contract which is guaranteed! This is beyond crazy.

It kind of reminds me of some of the stories I heard coming out of Silicon Valley right before the 2000 dot.com bubble burst, or the late 90s in Hollywood when I was out there working on projects. There were Hollywood script writers who made over $1,000,000 in the late 1990s for films projects that never saw the light of day. Even with the boom Hollywood is now seeing with writers needed for burgeoning Amazon and Netflix projects (in addition to all of the other studios,) no one is getting paid $1,000,000 for scripts unless the project becomes a blockbuster. That same bubble that hit Hollywood and Silicon Valley can and will hit college football.

Mark, I think the law of Economics says it has to crash someday. College football isn't taking in any more money than it did a couple of years ago. As a matter of fact, when TV contracts come up for renewal, there is no way they are going to get the kind of money it will take for some of these universities that have increased their budgets exponentially for college football to break even.

College football and college basketball are the only sports cash cows these schools have to keep the myriad of other athletic programs afloat. If they don't make money how is the women's field hockey team or the men's fencing team going to make money?

Man TAMU seems to have some serious coin!

Maybe they pay out the nose for more mundane positions too?! I'd relocate if they pay 6 figures to scrub toilets! Obviously that's a joke but they seem to have a fleet of Brinks trucks at their disposal.

As far as the bubble bursting, maybe-but when/how soon? Obviously there is concern about the long term health effects from playing (especially concussions) but it hasn't seem to curb the popularity IMHO.

Heck look at a place like Tennessee. That whole coaching search fiasco has creeped north of I believe $20 million to pay off the fired coaches and suspended AD and the new coach has not even lead a snap of play. This coming on the heels of $100 million plus having been raised to do an overhaul/facelift to Neyland.

I love football as much as anyone but a part of me wonders what more all of that money could be doing to the betterment of the world.

Of course the arms race isn't limited to athletics. Campuses across the country have been spending fortunes updating dining halls, dorms etc. to try to attract students, with academic buildings too. Both of my sisters went to Oxford Tech and what my younger sister paid for tuition in her final year was double what my older sister paid for her first year 10 years earlier.

Going back to the dot.com bubble analogy, yes I think it's a bubble but not the kind that many on here are hoping for. It wasn't the Intels, Microsofts and Googles that went under when that bubble burst. It was the pets.com type of companies that weren't making any money and relying on their next round of VC infusions to stay in business. That sound a lot more like the G5 programs that need millions in subsidies to balance their AD budget.

That's where the bubble will burst first. The question is whether it will filter up to the P5 schools.

Women's sports don't need to make money. They are a cost of having men's football. If football revenues fall enough to cause football to be discontinued, the women's sports will no longer be required.


I think you're right, at least partially. The first thing that comes to mind are schools at the FCS level that are spending money prolifically to move up to FBS, and they could be the leaders in a crash. Technically, though, I think we've already seen the first school to crash, that being Akron, who was nearly bankrupted by their facilities expansion. Other than them, and perhaps WMU, most of the MAC hasn't gone crazy on spending, and particularly not on expansion financed by debt, so I don't see the MAC at the forefront of a crash.

Don't forget that unlike Microsoft/Google, a school like Texas A&M doesn't have any guaranteed football revenue. If fans lose interest in football, whether over the CTE issues, or something else, they can easily reduce their contributions and ticket purchases, and then, along with declining TV contracts, their revenue stream can change dramatically. Considering that future revenues seem uncertain, for the first time in my lifetime, a ten-year guaranteed contract seems pretty crazy to do at this time.

Probably the ultimate chip on the shoulder little brother school in the country. They're utterly obsessed with trying to one up UT. This latest round of aggie obsession and spending madness is nothing new. Remember, they became the first million dollar coaching job when they tried to lure Bo from Michigan, ended up with Jackie Sherrill instead.