Sports Thread #1 For 3/4/10: The Runthrough

The runthrough....let's go:

As expected, Roy Halladay looked awesome today in his spring training debut with the Phillies, as they took on their World Series conquerors, the Yankees. CC Sabathia looked pretty good as well.

The news just continues to get worse if you are an Allen Iverson fan.

No matter if the season is over, this nation just will never stop talking about the NFL.

I know people are angry about Nigel De Jong going hard on Stuart Holden yesterday, but it only meritted a yellow card, not a straight sendoff. It was just a typical hard late tackle you see in high level soccer.

Sadly, Holden is out for six weeks, a blow for Bolton when it seemed he would be an integral part in their fight to avoid relegation. He still will get back in time for the end of the season it seems, but shame to see him go down just when he was breaking into the side.

And in the midst of the national Day of Action for public colleges getting attacked by budget cuts and higher student tuition fees, Dave Zirin lays down another high quality column:

At the University of Maryland, as tuition has been hiked and classes cut, football coach Ralph Friedgen makes a base salary of 1.75 million bucks, which would be outrageous even if the team weren't two-steps past terrible. Friedgen also gets perks like a $50,000 bonus if none of his players are arrested during the course of the season.

Ground zero of the student protest movement is the University of California at Berkeley. Over at Berkeley, students are facing 32% tuition hikes, while the school pays football coach Jeff Tedford 2.8 million dollars a year and is finishing more than 400 million in renovations on the football stadium. This is what students see: boosters and alumni come first, while they've been instructed to cheer their teams, pay their loans, and mind their business.

The counterargument is that college athletic departments fund themselves and actually put money back into a school's general fund. This is simply not true. The October Knight Commission report of college presidents stated that the 25 top football schools had revenues on average of $3.9 million in 2008. The other 94 ran deficits averaging $9.9 million. When athletic departments run deficits, it's not like the football coach takes a pay cut. In other words, if the team is doing well, the entire school benefits. If the football team suffers, the entire school suffers. This, to put it mildly, is financial lunacy. A school would statistically be better off if it took its endowment to Vegas and just bet it all on black.

It is worth the read everyone.

More to come everyone.