“Given how much UM paid Mike Harbaugh to be its football coach this year, I would quibble that football takes a backseat to academics.”
Jim Harbaugh’s comp is around $5,000,000/year and helps to put enough seats into the seats in order to generate football revenues sufficient to pay out $20,000,000/year in scholarships…so his salary effectively funds student tuition which is 400% of that salary and also generates enough revenue to help pay for a lot of other kids to play sports.
You can also do the math on $5,000,000/$6,600,000,000 where the denominator is the total institutional budget…clearly it is a fraction of 1%…or maybe $5,000,000/$1,300,000,000 where the denominator is the annual research budget.
While there are order of 43,000 students on campus, they have trouble getting 12,000 kids to fill the student section…that ratio also speaks to the place occupied by football on campus.
With over 101 graduate programs in the top ten in the nation (a graduate profile in the top 4 in the country) and with the overall institution ranked solidly in the top 25 GLOBALLY by the 3 major global surveys, whatever role is played by football on campus, it doesn’t detract from the academics.
In conclusion, those with an ignorance of Michigan who know about the institution from the outside and only through the lens of football, football may bulk large, but the reality is far far different. Watch the Tony awards tonight and you’ll see 4 Michigan students in action, but hear no mention of football.