Echoes are occasionally heard bemoaning the fact that a football coach usually draws a higher salary than a learned professor — and this on our campus. At California, they pay $12,000 a year for coaches to whip the Golden Bear into shape. With their enormous student body such a mere trifle is not considered as extravagance and they little begrudge the expenditure — but they are setting a bad precedent in the West.
Heretofore the west has turned out teams that have been on a high plane, that have even defeated the picked heroes of the East, with expenditures that are dwarfed by California’s salaries. The West has been able and content to get along with moderately paid coaching staffs. The present instance is the first radical departure therefrom, although considerable agitation has arisen in Seattle from time to time over the $4,000 salary of Gilmore Dobie. Eastern colleges sometimes spend fabulous sums for their coaches, and it seems to be in emulation of them, rather than through any real need, that California has opened her purse strings to such an extent. It is this very thing that is disrupting eastern athletics and causing deep murmurs of protest from the thinking alumni and faculties of many of the great institutions of the Atlantic seaboard. On this coast athletics have long been of purer and less commercial nature. California, a newcomer into the conference of the West, is introducing an example that is out of harmony with the best interests of amateur sport.