Where is the outrage? If it didn't come after last football season and numerous basketball and baseball seasons--apparently it Ãs not coming. But, this doesn't make any sense. Politics suck. It's time for the majority to demand Jacob's firing and hire a first class AD.
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Scarbinsky: Jay Jacobs makes more than Mal Moore? That's rich
By Kevin Scarbinsky | kscarbinsky@al.com
on March 09, 2013 at 8:17 PM, updated March 09, 2013 at 11:52 PM
Alabama AD Mal Moore (center) poses with UA football coach Nick Saban and the Crimson Tide's latest national championship trophies Jan. 8, 2013 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (Vasha Hunt/al.com)
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama - Are you sitting down? You should be. If you're not careful, this is the kind of news that'll knock you off your feet.
Jay Jacobs makes more money than Mal Moore.
I said, as USA Today reported after compiling the salaries of Division I athletics directors, Jay Jacobs makes more money than Mal Moore.
Yeah. I was floored when I first heard it, too.
Nothing else in the commendable, informative and comprehensive USA Today database was as eye-opening and head-scratching.
Sure, the annual compensation for Vanderbilt's David Williams, at $3,239,678, looks like a typo, but you already knew that Williams wears more than one hat on that campus.
Read the fine print, and you discover that his total income includes a one-time distribution of $2,009,952 "accrued in a supplemental executive retirement plan" and another $193,921 "in retirement and deferred compensation."
Just the same, it's been profitable for Williams to anchor down in Nashville.
Closer to home, where everything's a competition between Alabama and Auburn, it simply doesn't compute that the current Auburn AD makes $615,000 a year and the current Alabama AD makes $600,500.
There's not much separation there, unlike the gap between the programs they lead, which mirrors the last Iron Bowl score of 49-0.
Truth be told, that game wasn't even that close. Neither is the overall performance of the departments.
In the last 14 months, Alabama has won five national championships in four different sports: football, women's golf, gymnastics and softball. The repeat champion was football, and when an SEC football program wins big, it can cover the flaws of a department that's less than well-rounded.
That's not the case at Alabama. Basketball needs to continue to improve and baseball has to step up, but for the most part, the Crimson Tide is among the most successful athletics departments in the nation both competitively and financially.
According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, based on information provided by the schools themselves, Alabama athletics generated more than $124 million in revenue during the 2011-2012 academic year.
Only Texas, Ohio State and Michigan brought in more.
For all those reasons, the fact that Moore ranks 11th among SEC athletics directors in annual compensation suggests he's due the biggest raise of his career.
Maybe next time, instead of negotiating a coaching contract with Jimmy Sexton, Moore should hire him.
Auburn doesn't have any trouble paying its bills, either, under Jacobs. The Tigers were ninth in the nation in athletic revenue in 2011-2012 at more than $106 million, and they continued a streak of 22 straight years in the black. The financial success of the department is one of the main reasons given by Jacobs' supporters to beat back the argument that he's done all he can do and Auburn's in need of a regime change.
The balance sheet may look good - it would look even better if not for the unnecessarily generous buyout in Gene Chizik's contract - but the scoreboard tells a different story. Competitively, Auburn has fallen well behind the competition in the two most significant revenue-generating sports.
It isn't just that the football and men's basketball teams are losing games. The football team suffered through such a historically bad season that Jacobs was forced to fire Chizik two years after the Tigers won the national championship, and the basketball team, with the most losses in a single season in school history, is close to the merciful finish of a year to forget all its own.
How low can you go? Auburn will go down in history as the first SEC team to finish 14th in football and basketball.
By the standards of the profession, Jacobs isn't breaking the bank. According to USA Today's figures, he's exactly $100,000 a year above the national Division I average of $515,000 a year.
Among his SEC peers, only four athletics directors make less than Jacobs. From the bottom up, they are: Mississippi's Ross Bjork ($400,00), Mississippi State's Scott Stricklin ($450,000), Georgia's Greg McGarity ($525,000) and - wait for it - Mal Moore.
By the standards of overall performance under their watch, especially of late, there's no comparison between Alabama under Moore and Auburn under Jacobs. If Jacobs isn't necessarily overpaid in relation to his peers, Moore is terribly underpaid compared to his cross-state rival.
If nothing else, consider the most significant line items on their resumes. Jacobs hired and fired Chizik. Moore hired Nick Saban.
That's an oversimplification, of course. Neither AD handled any of those personnel decisions totally by himself, but each man will be remembered for them.
Of the two of them, Moore's the one who hasn't been compensated accordingly.
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