What's More Important, America: College Football or College Education?

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College football has always been a national pastime in America. Walk into any home broadcasting Penn State vs. Iowa or Notre Dame vs. Ohio State and you can quickly mistake the flair and exuberant cheers for any interdivisional pro matchup. Steelers-Browns, for example.

But NCAA football has been slowly creeping up the ladder in exposure over the past two decades, at the expense of education.

As coaching salaries increase, tuition rises for students, and state appropriations continue to fall, individual education budgets shrink, leaving us with a cloudy view of what’s really happening around the nation every time we flip on College GameDay.

There was time where a Saturday afternoon afforded viewers two or three games on television, but nowadays, Saturday comes complete with game after game after game starting at around noon and ending sometime around 10 p.m. on a multitude of channels—CBS, ESPN, and NBC leading the way.

The marketing world does a very good job at keeping college football right in front of us as well, inundating us with commercial after commercial highlighting “conference games,” way more than traditional commercials speaking about the institution itself.

By my count this Saturday, there was a 4-to-1 ratio in favor of commercials highlighting next week’s games rather than highlighting the institutions and what they have to offer students.

But, it doesn’t stop there.

Even the entertainment industry has gotten into the act with movies about college sports, college players, and college sports “history.” In fact, with national branding crammed down our pie-holes, there is more of a surrounding existence of college sports than the almighty NFL.

The latest concern in college sports is the alarming increase in coaches' salaries and insane planned usage of funds in an incredibly tough economic time.

But, it’s not just about the comparison of the health of our market and coaches' salaries. Rather, it's the effect it has on education.

Unbeknownst to most, as more and more coaches see double-digit increases in their salaries—salaries that are higher than that of the man running this country—most educational institutes are seeing tuition rises, cuts in funding, class cuts, and an overall decline in university quality.

Students pay while coaches get paid.

Pete Carroll, of Southern Cal, earns around $4.4 million and is one of three coaches with salaries that are worthy of the pregnancy ward.

And it’s students that take it on the chin.

USC has increased its tuition by 32 percent as well as cut classes, in addition to the $31-plus million in debt the athletic department simply looked away from in 2007 that has yet to be paid.

The University of California is paying Jeff Tedford $2.8 million in addition to another $430 million renovation project for its stadium, despite state appropriations and overall funding for education shrinking.

But Arizona is the worst of them all.

Arizona’s $378 million spending effort to upgrade sporting facilities in every major sport over the next 20 years is the most idiotic news I have heard from any state in this country to date—see what happens when education get’s cast aside?

This is from the same state who just recently claimed it was going broke.

Despite the announcement, and the exaggerated salary of Mike Stoops at $1.3 million, the state is one of 34 who have cut spending to public colleges and universities. Arizona State has cut almost 600 staff positions; can you guess where that touted $378 million is coming from now?

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