University athletics overshadow academic priorities

Editor’s note: The num­bers men­tioned in this arti­cle for salaries of the foot­ball coach­ing staff refer to the for­mer foot­ball staff at UK. The salaries of new head coach Will Stein — who was hired to replace Mark Stoops in December, 2025 — and his staff are sim­i­lar to those mentioned. 

It seems that many, if not most, of our uni­ver­si­ties and col­leges have for­got­ten what their orig­i­nal mis­sions were estab­lished to be. 

The University of Kentucky was estab­lished in 1865 as a land-grant uni­ver­si­ty whose pur­pose was “to pro­mote high­er edu­ca­tion and agri­cul­tur­al devel­op­ment in Kentucky.” Naturally, things change over a peri­od of 160 years, but one may rea­son­ably ques­tion whether the main goal of pro­vid­ing a high­er edu­ca­tion for stu­dents has not been demon­stra­bly changed, and a new empha­sis placed on ath­let­ics, which, inci­den­tal­ly, was not men­tioned in the orig­i­nal purpose. 

Recently, Kentucky Lantern report­ed that for­mer Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart would be tak­ing a part-time posi­tion with UK that pays $40,000 per year. He had recent­ly decid­ed not to accept a posi­tion at UK which was to com­pen­sate him $950,000 per year, after a pub­lic uproar over the fact that the posi­tion had no stat­ed pur­pose or goal. And even though his new posi­tion offers the pal­try sum of $40,000 year­ly, he is also being remu­ner­at­ed over $3 mil­lion as a sev­er­ance package. 

When the aver­age pay for a tenured pro­fes­sor at UK is $142,408 (accord­ing to univstats.com), ath­let­ic coach­es and staff pay far exceed that average. 

Head foot­ball coach Stoops’ salary is $6 mil­lion. Other staff in the foot­ball pro­gram includes 10 on-field assis­tant coach­es at $1.3 mil­lion each, coör­di­na­tors (no num­ber giv­en) at $1.3 mil­lion each, and posi­tion coach­es (no num­ber giv­en) at $450,000 to $575,000 each. 

Head men’s bas­ket­ball coach Pope’s salary is $5.1 million. 

And that’s just the tip of the ice­berg, though a very large tip it is. 

There are coach­es and assis­tants for every ath­let­ic pro­gram at the University, which includes base­ball, women’s bas­ket­ball, men’s and women’s golf, gym­nas­tics, rifle, men’s and women’s soc­cer, soft­ball, strength con­di­tion­ing, men’s and women’s ten­nis, track and field, and volleyball. 

Salaries for all ath­let­ic per­son­nel can be found online at the UK Office of Legal Counsel, along with the con­tracts for each. 

Added to the salaries of all these coach­es and assis­tants is the cost of build­ing and main­tain­ing the facil­i­ties to sup­port the ath­let­ics pro­gram, train­ing facil­i­ties, and stadiums. 

Kroger Field was com­plet­ed in 1973 at a cost of $12 mil­lion. If it were to be con­struct­ed today, the cost would like­ly be well over $70 mil­lion. Memorial Coliseum was com­plet­ed in 1950 at a cost of about $4 mil­lion and was just recent­ly ren­o­vat­ed at a cost of about $50 million. 

Obviously, ath­let­ic endeav­ors at UK bring in huge sums of mon­ey to the uni­ver­si­ty, but do those sums go any fur­ther than sup­port­ing the ath­let­ic pro­grams, or do they even go that far? 

As one who attend­ed uni­ver­si­ty on his own mer­its, with­out schol­ar­ships, and work­ing a part-time job, I sim­ply can­not fath­om the empha­sis that has devolved into the ath­let­ic pro­gram at UK while the costs for a stu­dent to edu­cate him­self or her­self con­tin­ue to esca­late every year. 

And the pay for those who are tasked with get­ting those stu­dents into the every­day world of eco­nom­ics, law, sci­ence, teach­ing, and med­i­cine is so much less than that of their coun­ter­parts in the ath­let­ic program.