behalf. For most college athletes they are paid for their work as an athlete representing the school with a scholarship and that comes with rules. In every "job" there are rules, if you don't like them you can look for a different "job" that does not require "voluntary film study".

illegal monopoly in any other industry,

that their sport generates.

When ND Football generates north of $150M in a year, it's probably time to start viewing it as a separate and unequal venture from women's rowing or men's tennis.

Does women's rowing just cease to exist? Sorry, we can't fund it, the 3rd string QB needs his share of the TV contract.

Honestly, I'd rather see the whole NCAA model stripped of money and blown up before whatever this current crap is goes wherever it is going.

If ND wants to have a non-academic pro team, then so be it. Pay the players appropriately, run it like an NFL team, and use the profit to fund (hopefully) worthwhile university endeavors.

ND, as one example, has $70M+ in profit to play with annually from football as it is today. Shifting $45M or whatever to the football team's player payrolls just creates a lower-margin business unit. Tighten the belt elsewhere like in the real world (Coach salaries, staff cuts, reduction in facilities spend, etc.)

But it doesn't work for the majority of the CFB world. If we're going to bankrupt 90% of the universities we might as well stop pretending we have anyone's best interests at heart.

I'd be happy to cut coaching and admin salaries but it's a gigantic Mexican standoff.

Profit sharing isn't even a thing in the NFL. I don't get a share of my company's profits, can I have that?

I do have a salary, and I agree there needs to be consideration of that for students, commensurate with the work they are doing, and protection for the dangers of the job they are doing.

Profits - I simply brought those up to illustrate how much Jack Swarbrick are raking in.

I don't disagree that that's ridiculous, as is 10 mil + for Saban. You're basically paying demand pricing, and it's ugly and brutal. If you offered 200k to a football coach you'd probably be laughed out of the room.

By comparison, at Purdue Mike Bobinsky makes ~750k. Morgan Burke made 500k. I don't know what a "reasonable" AD salary should be, but this seems closer to it.

If we're doing profit sharing, what's left after the facilities, the equipment, the scheduling, the logistics, and all the other outlay to get the sport going?

Let's say my company is young and still barely breaking even as it struggles to grow. Do I make $0? What about the 200+ football programs that lose money?

1. As has been repeatedly discussed back here, Swarbrick made $3M in one specific year (FY16) in which he received a $1.8M bonus. His typical total annual compensation (which includes base, incentive, deferred, etc.) is more like $1.7M to $1.9M.

2. Mike Bobinski does not make around $750K. That was his starting base salary when he got an extension almost 5 years ago. That extension also included various forms of deferred and incentive compensation. His total compensation is comfortably north of $1M a year.

All of this information is readily available. But even without digging into the numbers, people need to exercise a little more common sense about this stuff. I get that Notre Dame is poorly run. It is not, however, "we pay Jack Swarbrick two times the going rate for top ADs and 4 times the rate of Purdue ADs" poorly run.

Below someone suggested that Tim Murphy gets paid $75K (based on an article that he didn't realize was from 1993). People need to exercise the smell test with some of this stuff.

I'd love to excuse myself by saying it was a quick google, but that doesn't mean I need to stop there. Also to be fair, jacks salary showed up on multiple Google searches as that, so it'd be easy to be mislead. I was far more confident in Morgan Burke as we lived in the same neighborhood.

Honestly, I think I was also blinded by the fact that there is so much disparity in college coaching salaries. "Why not ADs as well?" my naive self thought. Whoops!

I'd go back to a basic issue I have with a lot of these discussions. What IS an appropriate salary for a good AD? What IS an appropriate salary for a good football coach?

The demand economy dictates what it is under the current system, though we would rather it not be so. I don't think we can change that without essentially making the demand nonexistent.

I'm mostly just firmly against sudden massive revenue sharing in a single sport just because it has more eyeballs than another sport in which athletes have the same level of effort.

If people want that, fine - go make it a semi-pro travel team, then it's a fundamentally different league.

None of this is to suggest the current system is great or ok, as is inevitably a counter-argument that seems to fly in. Just because one doesn't support the specific change mechanism doesn't mean I support the status quo either.