24 CommentsUPDATE: Athletics has confirmed that Pete Mangurian will coach Columbia football next year. He has an impressive track record at Cornell, Stanford, LSU and with the NFL.
Notoriously un well-versed in sports, we were intrigued by the financial details of Columbia’s football team, detailed yesterday in the Times:
- The head coach of the football team is paid somewhere around $250,000 a year. This is comparable to senior administrators and faculty. The average salary for Columbia’s 14 men’s coaches is $94,000.
- Last year, PrezBo’s salary was $1.5 million, 6.9 times the median professor salary of $222,000, including benefits. This was a 13% decrease from his previous year’s pay.
- For comparison, John Sexton of NYU earned roughly the same, while Harvard’s Drew Faust, received $875,000 (a 6.4 % increase), and Princeton awarded its president, Shirley Tilghman, $911,000,(a 3.4 % increase).
- For further comparison, tOSU just hired a new coach on the terms of $4 million annually, and the use of a private jet.
- The annual expenses of the football team come in around $2.6 million.
- Two of Columbia’s major donors have made big gifts to Athletics in recent years. Willaim V. Campbell, chairman of the Board of Trustees, pledged $10 million, and Robert K. Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, pledged $5 million. Both played football at Columbia.
- Columbia’s football team has only played five winning seasons since 1956.
Loading …
24 Comments
@Truth Total amount allocated to ALL student activities for the 2011-2012 school year: $391,600.13
This is CCSC + ABC + SGB + Club Sports + Everything else any student does here on campus that recieves Columbia money
Amount of money spent annually on the football team: $2,600,000
Get the facts, grow the fuck up, and accept the fact that the football team uses WAY more money per student who participates in that activity than ALL OTHER STUDENT GROUPS COMBINED!
If our clubs are so into marketing “pesudo-maginalized demographics” then how do you explain the fact that more people to come to culture showcases, CQA dances, and theatre events than EVER go to a football game with a FRACTION of the budget that the football team gets???
Intolerant, uneducated people like you make me sick.
@Anonymous The amount allocated to student groups is close to $1 million. Still not equal to the football budget, but your provided figure is WAY off. Check your facts at facu.columbia.edu.
And it’s not true that “more people to come to culture showcases, CQA dances, and theatre events than EVER go to a football game”. Thousands of people attend football games. 10,904 at last year’s homecoming game, to be exact. (source: http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/10/25/homecoming-attendance-shows-rising-school-spirit).
@tOSU thanks for remembering the all-important “t” Bwog
Buckeye-Lion ’15
@Michigan No. gtfo, Ohio!
Wolverine-Lion ’13
@Anonymous WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?
@Anonymous mutants! some terrible genetics experiment gone wrong…
@surely you’ve heard of the famous script ‘t’ that the tOSU marching band is known for.
@Anonymous That was a really fast hiring decision…
@actually it is pretty comparable with hiring of coaches at other schools that play college football. you can’t really fire the coach until the end of the season unless he’s really screwing up, but you need one in place at the latest by new year so you can still do good recruiting. it is the recruiting part that means the decision needs to be made before say april or may.
@Tom Brady I love Robert Kraft and Columbia.
@Anonymous Eliminate the football team.
@Anonymous eliminate you and your ilk instead. complain about CU not using more of its endowment money for financial aid and all of the ridiculous school-sponsored groups it wastes money on annually to appease every pseudo-marginalized demographic you come up with. the football team has certainly had its struggles and with students like you behind them, it’s no wonder.
@Anonymous The head coach of the football team is PAID somewhere around $250,000 a year
@Claire Duh. Fixed!
@Anonymous Fact: college football teams rarely make money in the traditional sense.
Fact: Factoring in the alumni donations that are a direct result of their participation on or with the football team, or the prestige they associate with having a well-funded football team, the 2.6 million a year is easily paid for and then some.
@Anonymous I can assure you, we receive no prestige from our sports teams. Hell, we don’t even care about them.
@Anonymous As a student, I would agree with that, but that doesn’t preclude alumni from feeling differently. I’m pretty sure Robert Kraft, as the president of the Patriots, would be slightly embarrassed if his own alma mater didn’t even have a football team.
@Anonymous I agree with you, but seeing as our football team really couldn’t get much worse, wouldn’t it make sense to save money and spend less on athletics? Spending as much as we do isn’t making us any better.
@fielding a football team is expensive The department doesn’t waste money so the only real way to reduce that cost is to eliminate the football team. $15mil from those two donations >> $2.9mil and that doesn’t included the many smaller donations given by former players.
@ummmm could you cite your sources for your “facts”?
@Sure Search for “most athletic departments lose money seattle” on Google. It should be the first link.
Although no specific schools are named, I’d be impressed if you could make a case for Columbia being in the very select upper echelon of big college football schools that makes a profit.
@Claire All the facts come from the three sources linked: NYPost, Bloomberg, and the NYT. The Chronicle of Higher Education released their data for executive compensation for last year a few days ago, so lots of news outlets are reporting on and analyzing the figures.
@ummmm oh not you, Bwog. the guy making the claims in the comments. I trust bwog’s sources. :)
@Truth Isn’t a football team supposed to make money? Isn’t that the who reason they are supposed to exist. 2.6 million seems a little steep so that a very small percentage of us can go watch 11 guys bash into another 11 guys especially considering where this money could go otherwise: financial aid, more tenured professors, etc.