Editor's Note: This guest column is by Steve Fitzgerald, a proud Spartan who earned his B.S. in Psychology and Political Science (’86) and his Master’s in Human Resources and Labor Relations (’88) from Michigan State University. His career includes senior leadership roles such as Chief Human Resources Officer at Vail Resorts and Visteon, Chief Talent Officer at Bridgewater Associates, and executive positions at Ford Motor Company, Sun Microsystems, and Avaya.

With Monday’s announcement of the selection of J Batt as the new vice president and director of intercollegiate athletics (athletic director) at Michigan State, my mind once again turned to the staggering level of compensation that is being paid to those involved in the top tier of intercollegiate sports - especially when compared to other elements of our society.

To be clear, this is not an idle rant, nor is it based in envy.

As a three-time Chief Human Resource Officer - and graduate of the MSU School of HR and Labor Relations - and now a coach/consultant who works in the fields of executive compensation and corporate strategy/governance, I have spent a career managing executive compensation for public and private enterprises. I fully “get” that elite talent doing work across highly competitive industries results in elite compensation and I have personally negotiated hundreds of pay packages and pay systems with that in mind.

This career gave me the ability to put the compensation of those in college athletics into a broader context. Put bluntly, the key players in college sports (athletic directors, conference commissioners, and the coaches of revenue sports) are paid at rates that are wildly disproportionate to the revenue they generate for their programs, as indicated by a comparison to their corporate peers at similarly elite levels.

Before I launch into an analysis that forms the basis of my view, let me make one contextual thing clear: I’m a huge MSU sports fan, and want our new AD, coaches, assistants and teams to be successful.

I am happier when MSU wins.

I really care about MSU on the field, court, ice, or pitch.

This discussion is not about diminishing the program or institution, but is more an attempt to put the runaway train that is collegiate sports compensation into proper societal context.

Disclaimer aside, let me give you a very specific comparison to illustrate my point. I will caution you that this is a wonky, detailed analysis, but I think it is important to show my work so that those unfamiliar with executive compensation can see why I have my point-of--view.

In 2024, the MSU athletic department generated $163,735,928 in revenue.

A small portion of this comes from the University itself (direct and indirect, $3.6m), the rest from ticket sales ($29.7m), media rights ($50.9m), B1G bowl revenue ($7.9m) and the rest from fundraising and other sources.

The bottom line is that the enterprise generated nearly $164m in revenue, an indication of how invested all of us are, because we put our money where our loyalties lie. (Source: Detroit Free Press, Jan. 27 2025, “Michigan State athletics operated through 4th budget deficit in past 5 years in 2023-24.)

Sounds like a lot, eh?

I hear it all the time, “Coaches and ADs get huge salaries because college sports are a big business.”

They are.

Here is the rub – in the context of REALLY big businesses, these departments generate a paltry amount of revenue relative to their investment. I worked for six firms in my 40-year corporate career. Every single one of them earned more revenue in a month than the MSU athletic department generates in a year.

Some did it in days or even hours.

Every year Fortune publishes lists of these biggest companies in the USA based on revenue. It’s commonly known as the Fortune500, and last year there were 18 Michigan firms on the list. The biggest one was Ford Motor Company (where I started my career), at #18 and generated $185 billion. The last of the 18 was CMS Energy, with $7.515 billion in revenue.

To be generous to the MSU Athletics Department in this analysis, let’s not compare them to Ford (or Dow, or GM, or Penske, all in the top 100). Instead, let’s look at CMS Energy, almost at the end of the list of the 500 biggest companies in the USA - at #441.

All public companies have a vast number of reporting requirements placed upon them by the Securities and Exchange Commission and other government regulators. One of those reporting requirements is that they must annually disclose the compensation paid to their top five officers of the enterprise. That must include the CEO and Chief Financial Officer, and the other three are the three highest paid officers of the firm, usually all from the C-Suite.

They publish these data in their annual proxy statement for shareholders (and anyone who looks) to see, in an analysis called the Compensation Discussion and Analysis (CD&A), which is truly about 25-45 pages of the most boring reading one can imagine. The CD&A is a document full of data, tables, footnotes (which really matter) and disclaimers. Despite it being very (very) dry, those savvy with these documents can distill a lot of important information from them.

Using the CD&A, let’s compare what CMS Energy pays its executives with what MSU is going to pay its new AD (which, by the way, pales in comparison to what it pays its football and basketball coaches). Consider the lowest paid of the five officers at CMS Energy, their Senior VP of Operations.

Like the AD at public university, this is a person that reports directly to the leader of the enterprise and runs only a portion of it.