Stringer's reward comes at a price

EDITORIAL, Home News Tribune Online (thnt.com) April 26, 2007

Rutgers University and C. Vivian Stringer agreed on Tuesday to a contract extension that will pay the women's head basketball coach the same base salary that goes to men's head football coach Greg Schiano.  Folks, that's a scenario one doesn't see every day.  Score one for gender equity.

Stringer is guaranteed $450,000 a year.  Annual incentives push her total compensation to approximately $900,000 a year.  The deal makes Stringer one of the highest-paid women's basketball coaches in the nation.  Even more significant, her compensation now dwarfs that paid out to a host of male counterparts who head up men's programs, including her Scarlet Knights stablemate Fred Hill, who takes home $358,000 annually, a paltry sum next to the riches Stringer is about to collect.

Did Stringer earn the nearly $1 million payday?  By the standards of today's college basketball marketplace, yes.  A 27-9 season and trip to the nation championship game, on top of a string of similar successes in recent seasons, place Stringer firmly at the top of her profession.  Like the CEO pay at a Microsoft or AT&T, that huge chunk of change goes with the territory — like it or not.

Even so, Stringer's newfound wealth and the contract windfall bestowed upon Schiano one year ago are stomach-churning stuff for those spectators who sit on the academic side of the field.

It bears repeating yet one more time that Rutgers University, like all of its college and university brethren supported by the state of New Jersey, is in the midst of a funding crisis unlike any before.  Rutgers has just finished chopping more than 825 jobs and 450 course offerings this year to make up for an $80 million budget shortfall.  Athletics chieftains also decided to ax six minor varsity sports, a pittance of a savings next to the department's multimillion-dollar budget for big-time athletics and big-time coaching salaries.

Rutgers has spent a pretty penny of late on support personnel in athletics as well.  No one should forget that on the heels of the university's 11-win football season and a first-ever bowl victory last fall, the school awarded lofty pay increases, some in the double-digit percentage range, to nine assistant coaches, who are now taking home annual salaries ranging from $115,000 to $185,000.  To top it off, those pay hikes came on top of one-month's-pay bonuses for getting the team into the Texas Bowl.  Coaches also get a $7,200 annual car stipend.

For all of that generosity — funded with taxpayer loot we might add — one must think football rakes in the big bucks.  Hardly.  Rather, it's still a gigantic money-loser.  So are both the men's and ladies basketball programs.  Altogether, they cost the state multiple millions every year.

How is it possible to justify spending so much on so few while so many on the sidelines suffer?  Stringer's contract is one more reminder of that question and the puzzle it presents for Rutgers.

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