Calhoun cashes in on success

UConn coach Jim Calhoun became an instant target for taunts after he shouted down a reporter's question about his salary. (Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

This just in: Jim Calhoun makes a lot of money.

On an annual basis, it's north of $1.6 million and south of Tom Cruise, but he has certainly made enough over the years to keep any good Braintree High grad comfortable for the rest of his natural life.

His earnings have been the subject of a great deal of debate ever since his infamous Feb. 22 postgame showdown with free-lance reporter Ken Krayeske. Of course, there wouldn't have been any discussion at all had he the good sense to deflect the sandbaggy question in a polite, diplomatic, and conciliatory way.

But that's another issue that won't go away, because it is most definitely not good policy for the highest-salaried public employee in the state of Connecticut to come off as arrogantly oblivious to the chilling economic climate that has negatively affected the American people, including many people who are good fans of the Connecticut Huskies. Jim Calhoun must live with the reality that he will be a part of the YouTube Hall of Fame until the day he dies.

But as for the subject of college basketball and football coaches becoming the highest-paid people on campuses, and, in the case of state schools, the highest-paid public employees, period, the fact is that ship left the dock a long time ago.

America has, rightly or wrongly, given its blessing to big-time college sports. It is a uniquely American passion. It is imitated to a very small degree by our Canadian friends, but it is an unknown concept in Europe, Asia, South America, Australia, and Africa. In the rest of the world, it's all sports clubs, not schools. An "athletic scholarship" to a university is unthinkable.

Even more unthinkable is the thought of Beaver Stadium on the campus of Penn State University or Michigan Stadium on the campus of the University of Michigan, each of which seats in excess of 107,000, or either of the primary facilities on the campus of the University of Tennessee. There you have Neyland Stadium, which holds 102,037, and Thompson-Bolling Arena, which seats 24,535 and which was built that large so Tennessee could say it had a larger basketball venue than Kentucky (Rupp Arena seating a puny 23,000 and change).

Such one-upsmanship may seem amusing to we sophisticates in Massachusetts, where Brady's knee, Papi's wrist, Lowell's hip, and Garnett's leg are of far more interest to the average local fan than anything pertaining to any college in the Commonwealth.

The flip side is that on such national sports holidays as Signing Day, the folks in Tuscaloosa and Chapel Hill regard us as the rubes. They don't care whether LeBron or Kobe (neither of whom went to college, after all) should be the MVP; they just want to know what the gurus think of their recruiting classes.

Around here, 99 percent of the fans find out what Boston College got when the team takes the field in September or the court in November. Except for a very few diehards, Signing Day comes and goes without comment.

In this context, people who follow these college teams do not think there is anything odd or, Lord knows, obscene about coaches making salaries in seven figures. Back in the day, it may have been enough to give Bear Bryant his own state trooper, a free car, and a good stock tip. Nowadays, you still get the state trooper, the car, the house, and the country club membership (this might not be the time for the stock tip), but the most important thing is to show your coach the truest form of love: many, many Benjamins.

Once Upon A Time, coaches did not expect to get rich. They did what they did because they loved it. They loved the game and they enjoyed having influence on the lives of young people. Some were more scrupulous than others, but most of them were relative innocents for whom the end of the rainbow was a cushy athletic director's job after they were done with coaching, the idea being that they would have the title and the long lunches and some assistant would do the heavy lifting.

But we live in a far different world now. Sports have exploded in America, and college football and basketball are now huge businesses. Coaches are as much CEO as they are coach. Nike changed the landscape in the early 1980s by throwing money at basketball coaches (e.g. John Thompson, Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski), and salaries themselves took off as coaches became stars and competition for top coaches became more and more fierce. It was the marketplace yelling, loud and clear.

Football was a bit slower to respond, but, don't worry, it has caught up. The big guys make $3 million-plus. Pete Carroll makes more than $4 million at USC, but the public has no complaint there because USC is a private school (the faculty is a different matter).

The fact is that people in states where college sports are king do not gather at the local breakfast haunt or the water cooler complaining about the head coach making a lot of money. What matters to people who avidly follow such teams as Alabama football, Texas football, Florida football, Georgia football, Tennessee football, Michigan football, Ohio State football, Penn State football, Nebraska football, LSU football, Oklahoma football, Kentucky basketball, North Carolina basketball, Kansas basketball, and Indiana basketball - to name but a few obvious examples - is winning.

Winning. Not graduating. Winning. That is the gospel truth. You hear a lot of high-minded talk from coaches about doing it the "right way," and it's a laudable concept, but the average alumnus and fan can always rationalize a shaky student-athlete here or a questionable coaching practice there as long as the team keeps on winning.

The above-named institutions are all state schools. The coaches' income in all cases is derived from a variety of sources, ranging from straight salary, to shoe contracts, to radio and TV shows, to summer camps, to booster contributions. But I promise you that if the citizens of those 15 states were asked to vote on whether or not a successful coach was getting too much in salary, the overwhelming answer would be no. Coaches who win are allowed to cash in.

The state of Connecticut is no exception. Connecticut basketball, both men and women, is of great social importance in the Nutmeg State. Drive down I-84. The sign at the exit to Storrs does not boast of an English department, drama program, or chess team. Rather, it calls attention to the two men's and five women's championships won by the school. If Jim Calhoun and Geno Auriemma raise those championship numbers next month to three and six - which could very well happen - do you think there will be an outcry to cut their salaries?

It is the same anywhere in America. College and high school athletics have always been identified as a great binding force, especially in areas where major league sports teams do not dominate. The roots of this obsession with big-time college sports are now more than a hundred years deep. It really would be impossible to think of schools such as Kentucky, Alabama, Kansas, and Oklahoma without thinking of basketball, football, basketball, and football, respectively, wouldn't it?

In strictest theory, of course, big-time sports have nothing to do with the mission of a university. But somewhere along the way college teams became a galvanizing social force, and let's not forget that it all began right here on Soldiers Field Road when Harvard constructed America's first great campus athletic shrine in 1903.

Harvard long ago chose to go in another direction. It's nice that Harvard wants to beat Yale, but it in no way compares to the way Ohio State wants to destroy Michigan, Texas wants to emasculate Oklahoma, or North Carolina wants to humiliate Duke.

That's the real world of college sports, and UConn is very much involved. By choice.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist and host of the Globe's 10.0 on Boston.com. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.