Sc Deferred Compensation

Big Ten's Delany among four commissioners paid $1 million

The board chairmen of the ACC , SEC and Big 12 were all said by aides to be unavailable for interviews.

The conferences, which oversee a host of college sports besides football, operate as 501(c)(3) charitable organizations, meaning their operations are tax-exempt. The compensation is generally set by boards of directors made up of the member schools' presidents and chancellors.

The six conferences, all of which receive automatic bids to Bowl Championship Series games, are among 11 that make up college football's highest level. The other five don't receive automatic bids and receive smaller bowl payouts from the BCS , although those payments have increased in recent years as overall BCS revenue has grown.

Those five conferences — Mountain West, Mid-American, Sun Belt , Conference USA and the Western Athletic Conference — all paid their commissioners less than $600,000 in 2009. But they also brought in far less in total revenue — between $9 million and $50 million, compared to $102 million to $244 million for the six core BCS conferences, the tax records show.

AP's review also found that Slive, the SEC commissioner, received a $1 million bonus in 2008, nearly doubling his pay that year to $2.1 million. SEC spokesman Charles Bloom said that bonus was for two TV deals the SEC negotiated that year, with ESPN and CBS.

Beebe, the Big 12 commissioner, got the biggest pay raise from 2008 to 2009. His $997,000 was more than 50 percent higher than his 2008 pay of $661,000. Big 12 spokesman Bob Burda said the conference board of directors raised Beebe's pay to put him on par with the other conferences that receive automatic BCS bids.

Dave Czesniuk, senior associate director at Northeastern University's Sport in Society, argued that the figures reflect the over-commercialization of college sports.

"I can't imagine that the well-being and growth of student-athletes is of paramount importance when there's that level of compensation," he said, when told of the commissioners' pay. As for Slive's bonus, Czesniuk said, "Let's be real about what's being rewarded. You can't say that it's about the student-athlete experience."

The million-dollar paydays for the commissioners still lag far behind some of the nation's top football college coaches. Texas coach Mack Brown , for instance, makes around $5 million, while Alabama coach Nick Saban earns $4.7 million. Still, the revelations could help fuel a revived movement to pay players, many of whom get athletic scholarships to cover tuition, fees, room, board and books, but not a slice of the revenues.

Deferred Compensation Lets Executives Avoid 401(k) Saving Caps ...

“Last year, about 79 percent of chief executive officers at Fortune 100 companies were offered so-called nonqualified deferred compensation plans, according to Equilar , an executive- compensation data firm in Redwood City, California. Depending on the employer’s plan, executives and managers may be able to defer an unlimited amount of their salaries or bonuses on a pretax basis until a future date.

State deferred compensation programs, their status in thirty-six states

Compensation, Work Hours and Benefits, Proceedings of the New York 57th Annual Conference on Labor

Basic law of pensions and deferred compensation, ALI-ABA course of study materials

Nonqualified deferred compensation plans

Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation