Here’s some perspective on the economic facts of the firing of Penn State’s head football coach, James Franklin. The buyout of Franklin’s contract was reported in your newspaper to be $49 million.
A quick internet search shows that among the academically elite Ivy League universities (Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Cornell and Brown), not one head football coach earns as much as $200,000 annually. Taking $200,000 as a maximum, the total head coaching salaries of the entire Ivy League would not exceed $1.6 million annually.
Amazingly, Penn State’s buyout would be enough to fund the salaries of all of the head football coaches of the Ivy League for the next 30 years! Does anyone think that a university’s reputation for academic excellence is affected by how its sports teams perform?
Charles E. Henry
Greensburg