College basketball and football coaches at some elite Division I schools are paid a lot of money. Sometimes, programs at such schools make a lot of money. And in the high-stakes world in which these two entities exist, the costs of keeping both sports and the programs that play them going are soaring at an unsustainable pace.
At the NCAA Scholarly Colloquium on College Sports in Atlanta, university administrators spoke up. One of them, Southern Methodist University President Gerald Turner, said changing the system would require a cohesive effort, starting with financial restraint in coaching salaries, the Associated Press reports. Turner told his audience that schools forget financial responsibility when searching for a new coach or trying to retain a current coach.
"Change will require a national effort," Turner said. "It can't be done just at the conference level and certainly not at the institutional level."
Turner acknowledged, however, that coordination will be difficult.
"The big task as we move forward is to clearly define how to accomplish fiscal reform in a system where there is great diversity among budgets, great diversity among funding models, institutional practices, state legislatures, and other economic considerations and characteristics," Turner said.
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George of TX 1:17PM January 14, 2010