What Price Football?

When the University of Washington fired Football Coach John Cherberg (TIME, Feb. 13), it sailed into a storm of scandal involving under-the-counter payments of money to players by booster alumni. But Washington was apparently still more interested in victories than in its reputation, so it hired young (31)

Coach Darrell Royal away from Mississippi State at $17,000 a year. Then, in a poll of the faculty, the student Daily showed how wide is the gulf between the playing fields of Washington and its corridors of learning.

The Daily asked: 1) Is the new coach's salary justified, and 2) should football be de-emphasized? To the salary question 81% answered no; to de-emphasis 79% said yes. Many professors had further comments. Samples:

P: "At least 3 1/2 Ph.D.s, with individual professional and academic experience superior to our new coach, could be hired for his salary."

P: "It is fantastic what a cheap price is put on 'education' at this school. We are all just plain stupid, spending years preparing for education in specified fields when a man with nothing but brawn and no brains can get $17,000 a year for chasing a bunch of ninnies around a field with a ball. Every time I think of it, I get so outraged I could spit."

The facultymen had reason for outrage. Though one physician on the medical-dental school staff gets a top salary of $14,376, the average pay for a full professor outside the professional schools is $8,469. Coach Royal's 27-year-old assistant, three years after his service as a quarterback at the University of California, gets about $7,500. The salary of 47-year-old Pulitzer Prize Poet Theodore Roethke, professor of English: $9,018.

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