Deal or No Deal - K-State Style

We came across a really insightful article today by Bob McClellan on Rivals that analyzed assistant coaching salaries at the top fifteen schools (by final ranking) during the 2007-08 season.  Using FOIA again, McClellan discovered that there are significant inequities in what assistant coaches at several of these top public university programs are paid.  After we picked our jaw up off the floor from awe at the size of these salaries for the assistants (!!!), we immediately focused in on the anomaly that McClellan made the keystone of his story - Kansas State assistant coach Dalonte Hill was paid $400,000 last season and is set to make $420,000 this year.  From the article:

Hill, entering his sixth season as a college assistant, will make more money for the 2008-09 season than the entire three-man staffs at Ohio State, Washington State and Wisconsin and only $5,000 less than the staff at Texas, a survey done by Rivals.com shows. K-State released Hill’s contract in May. The school paid him $400,000 in 2007-08, and it will pay him $420,000 a year – $150,000 in base salary and $270,000 in “additional compensation,” defined as “television, radio, internet, promotional and other services” – for the next four years. He is entering his third year at K-State. Because private universities are not required to release salary information, it’s unknown whether Hill is the highest-paid assistant in college basketball. But based on Freedom of Information requests, Hill is far and away the highest-paid assistant among public universities that finished in the top 15 in the 2008 coaches’ postseason poll.

So what’s the catch here?  Why is Hill making literally hundreds of thousands of dollars more than his peers?  Oh, that. 

After three years with the [Charlotte] 49ers, Bob Huggins lured Hill to Kansas State. Hill was responsible for the recruitment of [Michael] Beasley, who stuck with his pledge to play for the Wildcats even though Huggins left for West Virginia after just one season.  Hill coached Beasley in the AAU ranks, and Beasley called him “like a big brother.” Beasley had committed to Charlotte while Hill was still there. When Huggins lured Hill to K-State, Beasley followed him. By then, Beasley had become the No. 1 prospect in the country.

So all of this talk got us to thinking…  Beasley spent one year at K-State and it’s been argued in this space before that in terms of exposure and notoriety for the program, Beasley was an absolute WIN, even though he only stuck around Manhattan, Kansas, for one season.  But to echo Howie Mandel, was it a good deal for KSU to pay Dalonte Hill so much money considering the financial impact that Beasley had on the program?  The answer, my friends, is a resounding yes. 

There are multiple ways to measure financial impact, but let’s keep this simple if we can.  We’re only going to consider television and NCAA Tournament revenue because we can easily measure it, although ticket and merchandise sales were both also marginally up for the 2007-08 season.

Television Revenue.  It’s difficult to find hard numbers on what FSN, ESPN and its family of networks pay schools per regular season basketball game, but this much we know to be true: for Big 12 football, ESPN pays $300k per game and FSN pays $150k pe