BYU's Bronco Mendenhall attacks SEC coaches salaries

*Not Bronco Mendenhall

It’s easy to take a moral stance against the high salaries being paid to coaches at top football schools when you’re a Mormon. It’s also easy to do when you’re a college football coach who’s not being paid nearly as much as your peers. Luckily for BYU’s Bronco Mendenhall, he’s both. In this article by Brett McMurphy from CBSSports.com, Mendenhall takes aim at the corruption in college football by blaming those coaches, especially in the SEC, who make over double what he does.

Mendenhall makes a point to hit all of the current buzzwords in his financial witch hunt:

– “It kind of takes the amateur part out of sports when someone is making [$5] million to coach, doesn’t it?”

– “With the economy the way it is, I mean, it doesn’t make much sense to me.”

– “I prefer walk-on players compared to scholarship players because they’re actually contributing their own resources for the value of participating in sport and getting their education.

McMurphy cites ten coaches in the SEC who make over two million dollars a year and fall under Mendenhall’s umbrella of corruption breeders. Instead of listing them, I’ll just tell you that it’s everybody but Joker and James Franklin at Vanderbilt. After reading his comments, one would expect Bronco to be making the bare minimum as the head man at BYU, but that’s not the case. Mendenhall avoided revealing his salary to McMurphy because of a confidentiality clause in his contract, but in his first years as head coach (2005-2008) he was estimated to have a salary of $900,000. After an extension from 2008-2011 and a recent extension through 2013, one can assume that his salary well exceeds $1 million. That may not be as much as Nick Saban ($5.25 million) or Les Miles ($3.75 million), but I know a few people who get by comfortably on much less.

Mendenhall could have argued his point in a better way than by attacking the salaries of his fellow coaches, especially when he is making a respectable amount doing the exact same things they are (except winning championships). Just because there’s a microphone in front of your face, doesn’t mean you should tell it all exactly how you feel it. He knows that he wouldn’t really want a team composed solely of walk-ons and he knows that there are much graver threats to the economy than the salaries of college football coaches, but he used CBSSports.com as his pulpit to hypocritically proselytize to a group that isn’t likely to budge anytime soon. It was a slip of judgement on his part and if he’s smart he’ll go back and clarify some of the comments that he made. However, a slip of judgement like this is not unprecedented for Bronco. Mendenhall named his children Raeder-Steel, Breaker and Cutter. Gotta think even the Mormon kids make fun of those names.