Beam them down

One wonders what color the sky is in the world of Dick Baddour, athletic director at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Certainly it is not of this world. For Baddour -- who apparently pretty much runs his own show without interference from those who are alleged to be his bosses -- certainly has made an other-worldly move in giving his football coach, Butch Davis, a contract extension and a $291,000 annual raise. That raise alone, by the way, is more than double the salary of a full professor.

The hike will bring the coach's compensation, including a shoe deal and bonus potentials, to over $2 million annually. That's still a little less than men's basketball coach Roy Williams.

Athletics officials and those boosters who seem to define the school by its football and basketball prowess long ago ceased to care about how outsized coaches' salaries are compared to those of professors -- or even to chancellors and university presidents. (Davis and Williams earn more in one year than the once-in-a-lifetime reward for winners of the Nobel Prize.)

They seem oblivious as well even to thinking about whether it is a healthy thing for a public university with a stellar academic reputation to send a maddening message about its priorities, one that seems to set the athletics program apart from all else. That message, by the way, is the same whether the money to fund athletics comes from the taxpayer or from private donations.

The boosters and Baddour -- and UNC-CH certainly isn't alone in losing its way with its surrender to the siren song of "big-time" sports -- look only at the "market" and say: Davis is a hot item, others may try to hire him, etc. (There have been rumors that the football factory at the University of Arkansas is flirting with Davis, which he denies.) We have to grant this whopping raise, the story goes, or we may lose our coach.

The argument reflects an attitude that sees a coach moving on to greener pastures as a catastrophic event. It's not. (Although for Davis to depart after only one year would be a colossal insult.) It also reflects a conclusion that college sports and professional sports are equivalent when it comes to competing for talent. They're not.

Where is Chancellor James Moeser in all this? Sadly, under his tenure, the athletics program has grown more burly and independent. For that matter, UNC system President Erskine Bowles ought to be sounding some alarms here.

The university's quest for top 10 status on the football field -- it's long been there in basketball -- now apparently has taken it to other galaxies. Back here on Earth, it's pretty disturbing.