Commodity exchange

Maybe part of it was spite. You'd like to think otherwise, but humans are humans, and sometimes they are not their best selves when there's money to be made and they're told, for very good reasons, that they can't make it just now.

And so maybe at least one eyebrow ought to be raised over the timing out there at the University of Iowa, where, as chronicled here by Pat Forde of Sports Illustrated, some 100 athletes were ushered into the practice gym in Carver-Hawkeye Arena not long ago and told their sports were being eliminated. Athletic director Gary Barta marched in, told the men and women swimmers and male tennis players and gymnasts they were no longer Iowa athletes, and marched out.

Boom. Done. And all of three days before classes were to begin.

More to the point, it was also a week or so after the Big Ten announced it was postponing the 2020 football season because of the Bastard Plague.

Not canceling, mind you. Not eliminating football the way Iowa eliminated men's and women's swimming, men's tennis and men's gymnastics. Just postponing it for awhile.

Iowa was one of the schools -- robust football schools all, naturally -- that bellyached the most about that. And a week or so later, Iowa pulled the plug on four sports.

Maybe it wasn't the intended message. But that sure sounded an awful lot like "See? You took football away from us, and now we're going to have to get rid of four sports and screw up the lives of almost 100 athletes because without football we can't afford them. See what you did?"

Even though football, mighty engine of commerce that it is, isn't going away. Even though it's just being pushed back a bit because of the crazy notion that maybe playing football isn't such a hot idea in the middle of a pandemic that's forcing schools all over the country to shut down their campuses.

Continuing to prepare for football on an empty campus, after all, sort of ruins the illusion that football isn't a bidness and the athletes who play it aren't university employees. Just for one thing.

In any event, Iowa's just latest school that's paring down its so-called non-revenue sports. Stanford, for instance, cut 11 recently -- even though, as Forde points out, most of those sports are only partially schollied and have miniscule budgets compared to football, which both produces revenue and consumes it in equally gargantuan measure.

And that's the problem, see. Football giveth, but it also taketh away.

It's why Iowa felt compelled to eliminate four sports whose budgets don't breach the low six figures, mere weeks after Iowa collected a $55.6 million conference revenue share. Where did all that money go?

Well, to pay head football coach Kirk Ferentz, who earns north of $5 million a year.

And to pay for eleventy hundred assistant coaches.

And to pay for 85 full rides in a sport that fields only 22 players at a time.

And, lastly, to pay for ridiculously lavish football complexes that -- at national champ Clemson, for instance -- include a movie theater, a state-of-the-art arcade and a laser tag facility.

There is absolutely no earthly reason any of the above is necessary. There is absolutely no earthly reason any successful football program in the country can't along with 75 or so schollies instead of 85, or without the 33 assistant coaches and staff Iowa's football program supports.

The assistants alone raked north of $5 million a year total, as of 2018.

To Iowa's credit, Ferentz, men's basketball coach Fran McCaffrey, women's basketball coach Lisa Bluder and wrestling coach Tom Brands are all taking 15 percent pay cuts, and Barta is cutting his own compensation package as well.

But still. Still, you've gotta wonder about the priorities here.

Or maybe you don't.