Mike Celizic

The University of Florida has cut its budget by $42 million and is in the process of raising tuition by 15 percent. But the students and faculty need not despair. In the midst of this gloom comes the heartening news that there’s still money available to give the football coach a raise.

This news was delivered by the university’s president, Bernie Machen, who told the Orlando Sentinel that he wants Urban Meyer to be the highest-paid football coach in the SEC. And at a mere $3.49 million a year, Meyer is $410,000 behind Alabama coach Nick Saban and $260,000 less than LSU’s Les Miles.

I’m not sure what Machen hopes to accomplish by paying Meyer more money. Maybe he’s angling for a job in the financial services sector, where profligate spending on salaries by institutions that are begging the government for money is seen as a virtue. Maybe Machen feels pity whenever he thinks about his poor football coach trying to make ends meet on not even $3.5 million a year.

Machen said he genuinely feels that Meyer deserves the raise. He has, after all, won two national championships in three years, which has loosened the wallets of the athletic boosters. And other coaches with fewer accomplishments are making more. Machen might have added that the football program is a massive cash cow that makes enough money to fund the rest of the university’s athletic program, with money to spare. According to the most recent figures provided by the NCAA, the Gators have just one of 19 athletic programs in the nation that produce more revenue than they consume, and a recent Newsday article said only six schools "consistently end the year with a positive in net revenues."

Football provides most of that excess, and men’s basketball provides the rest.

According to published reports, the University of Florida’s athletic association will return $6 million to the school this year. So Meyer is definitely earning his keep.

But no matter how good the arguments are for proposing a big raise for someone who hasn’t asked for it, this is just wrong. Regardless of how much money Meyer brings in, this just looks bad.

Over the past three years, the University of Florida has cut more than $100 million from its budget. This year’s cut is seven percent. There’s fewer instructors, research programs are being cut. The university said that the quality of education isn’t being diminished, but you can’t cut that much money without hurting something. Then there are the students who are seeing tuition increase by 15 percent.

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Paying Meyer another half million isn’t going to change any of the harsh financial realities at the university. But that’s not the point.

The guy has a fabulous contract with several years yet to go on it. He’s not threatening to go anywhere else. So why, in these economic times, does Machen have to make this gesture?

What this looks like is just more proof that the cult of celebrity is utterly out of hand. We judge people not by what they do but by how much they make. That’s the message Machen is sending to his entire university community: What you are inside is meaningless; how much money you have is what’s important.

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