When Bob Frederick was hired as Kansas University athletics director back in 1987, his salary was $74,000 a year. When Frederick resigned in late April, he was making $166,000.
That’s a gradual hike over 14 years of $92,000.
When KU hired Allen Bohl as Frederick’s successor on Thursday, Bohl’s salary was announced as $255,000. That’s $89,000 more than Frederick was making.
In other words, the price tag for KU’s athletics director climbed nearly as fast in one year as it did in the previous 14 years.
Curiously, on the day Bohl’s hiring was announced on front pages of newspapers all over the state, many inside pages carried a story about the Kansas Board of Regents granting Robert Hemenway, KU’s chancellor, a conservative pay hike to $219,420 a year.
Thus, for what is believed to be the first time in history, a Kansas University chancellor will be earning less money than the school’s athletics director.
Not that the chancellor was the university’s highest-paid employee. William Fuerst, dean of KU’s School of Business, had an annual salary last year of $225,000, and two administrators at the KU Medical Center are in the $265,000 range.
Still, to pay the Kansas University AD almost as much as it pays its medical center’s top executives proves how much athletics mean to a contemporary university.
That importance can be summed up in one word: Perception.
When KU’s athletics teams are winning, alumni and boosters are euphoric. If you asked, they’d donate money to buy new trash cans for the Burge Union. But when the Jayhawks are losing, you couldn’t squeeze money out of them to pay for an operation for Tiny Tim.
It’s no secret Kansas sports teams haven’t been winning. During the just-completed 2000-2001 school year, KU’s men’s basketball team tied for second in the Big 12 and the softball team tied for third. No other KU varsity sport finished in the first division. It was almost that bad the year before.
It’s no secret many of the big donors had lost confidence in Frederick. Kansas University is about to kick off an ambitious capital campaign, and reportedly many of the potential donors vowed they wouldn’t contribute as long as Frederick was AD.
Regardless, at a time when Frederick should have been pressing the flesh and reassuring the “big cigars” better times were ahead, his focus was on improving relations between coaches and student-athletes while emphasizing sportsmanship and ethical conduct.
Frederick’s noble agenda was, of course, admirable, but the perception of a university athletics department is not gauged by its harmonious operation.
In trying to keep up with the Joneses in the Big 12, Kansas had to go on a spending spree to upgrade its tomb-like football stadium, maxing out on bonds to the point where it couldn’t afford to borrow any more money.
Donors paid for a new baseball stadium and a new volleyball arena, and then the spigot ran dry. KU couldn’t raise enough money to expand its antiquated strength center, and ambitious plans for a new track facility, soccer field and softball stadium gathered more and more dust.
Kansas University athletics was spinning its wheels and Frederick, I’m sure, could see the handwriting on the wall. It was time for a change.
Now the change has been made. Kansas has hired a man with a history of knowing who to stroke and how, a man who knows how to unite a university and its patrons behind a football program and a man who understands the rich become richer through football television appearances.
Nowhere in this country will you find a university without a stringent minority that refuses to admit a school’s national reputation marches in lock-step with the wins and losses of its sports teams.
And yet if you ask the man on the street in Winnemucca, Nev., what he knows about Kansas University, he’s going to mention the men’s basketball team, not the school’s high ranking in the Fiske Guide to Colleges.
