A prevailing theme in pandemic sports, in addition to questions of safety and scheduling, has been the tightness of money.
Major League Baseball owners squeezed their way to fewer games in 2020 than they could have played because (they said) money was lost on every game played. NFL revenue will fall by billions of dollars with teams playing in front of sparse crowds or no fans at all.
And in particular, colleges have asked their highest athletic earners to take pay cuts — resulting, for instance, in voluntary double-digit salary reductions for P.J. Fleck and others with the Gophers this year.
Word of these difficult financial times, however, does not seem to have reached SEC football.
For the deep-pocketed boosters at traditional powerhouse programs, money is apparently still no object even in 2020.
How else would we otherwise interpret the news out of Auburn that Gus Malzahn — a coach who won two-thirds of his career games with the Tigers and went 6-4 this season — has been fired and will be paid a buyout of ... please, sit down ... $21.7 million!
Half of that sum, nearly $11 million, is due within 30 days.
Perhaps the wealthiest of the wealthy Auburn athletic benefactors are among the ultra-rich who added nearly $1 trillion in wealth during the pandemic while those in the lower and middle classes struggled.
