Notice, for example, where Stan Fish is now. Hint: it ain't Duke. A lot of the other people Duke brought in at great expense to build a "world-class' English department have moved on too. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates didn't last two years, before Harvard offered him more money -- lots more money -- to move on.

The difference between them is that Coach K, unlike Stan Fish, pretty much brings in enough endorsement and alumni money to pay for his program

This reminds me of macroeconomist Robert Barro's near move to Columbia, which was followed by an extremely generous, some would say exorbitant, counter-offer by Harvard. Barro got something along the lines of control of 8 grad students and a few hires, in addition to cash and prizes.

See "Harvard Economist Robert Barro to Join Columbia" (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/record/archives/vol23/vol23_iss20/13.html), a page that also links to "Follow-up: Barro to Remain at Harvard").

That episode was unusual in that Barrow accepted the offer and then went back on his acceptance.

AB

Two rules on seeking offers:

1) Don't go to the well too often. Eventually deans get tired of being blackmailed. Also, one can get a reputation for teasing and then schools become strangely unresponsive to one's hints that one would be interested in moving.

2) So, don't bluff unless you are prepared to have your bluff called. It does happen that a dean, faced with a an offer, remarks, "Well, we'll be sorry to lose you, but I am sure that you will like X. There are some good people there. Good luck."

I'm no academic but there is no way an 8 million dollar NCAA basketball coach is an argument for the free market. It's a monopolist's wet dream.

I could field a better team at Adam Smith State if I could pay my 12 recruits a fraction of the total money that Coach K "earns" at Duke. The NCAA ban on payments to college athletes in the name of amateurism is a whore's false virtue designed to maintain monopoly profits. Coach K can command such a salary because the players he coaches are more akin to indentured servants than free market labor. How much more do elite players make compared to elite coaches in the NBA? How do you explain the difference at the college level where coaches make millions and players get a scholarship valued at maybe $50,000 over 4 years?

Cash cow Division I Basketball and Football have nothing to do with the academic missions of the schools that participate. The University of Central Florida cut night classes because they had no funds and students held bake sales to try and keep the classes open. At the same time, UCF was building premier athletic facilities with some of the highest student fees in the country. Free market my ass...big time college sports are bread and circuses for stupid alumni who learned so little in college they happily go along with the charade. The free market doesn't pay the Army football coach more then the Centcom commander...markets don't allow for that kind of foolishness. Jay Berwanger must be rolling over in his grave.

Back when I was a Chicago undergraduate, I worked in the photocopy center in the Social Science building, and we got all sorts of letters to copy, which we were not supposed to read, but of course did. They included all sorts of "here is my offer; match it" letters, and they were not very polite. They play rough in the big leagues.
This is not confined to the big leagues. Valuable minority faculty play the same game, and it is not very subtle either.

"I'm no academic but there is no way an 8 million dollar NCAA basketball coach is an argument for the free market."

Coach K doesn't make $8M, he was offered that by the Lakers. According to ESPN he makes about $800,000 from Duke, though he is expected to get a raise now.

This *is* an example of a free market, the market for coaches is a free market, the fact that the market for players is not free is irrelevant.

No doubt wooing professorial talent was precisely where Broadhead honed his pitch. And give the guy a break, Yale's never had a guy like Coach K. Walter Camp?

Consider that around the time Coach K arrived at Duke, it was a very good, largely regional university that could occasionally sneak a student or Professor away from the top schools. Now, Duke is consistently in US News's top 5, competes with the best for faculty (even if they lose some as well), and seems to be heading nowhere but up. Something tells me that their basketball success has had a lot to do with Duke passing Emory, Rice, and Vandy as the preeminent private university in the South.

Picking up on joejoejoe's point, good players make money for the school because they bring in revenue but don't get paid (though they do get scholarships). A good deal of a college coach's off-season is taken up by recruiting, convincing those revenue producers to attend. Since the student-athletes (ahem) don't get much of that money, the coach does.

Since there is a competitive market for coaches, they wind up getting a fair amount of the net profits.

From The Herald-Sun:

"Duke will not disclose financial terms of Krzyzewski's contract, which has to be renewed annually after 2011. But according to IRS documents, he commanded a base salary of $800,000 and total compensation of $875,048 in fiscal 2003. Coupled with his Nike contract, he reportedly makes more than $1.5 million and is one of the highest-paid coaches in the college game, if not the highest, according to a Duke source."

Above, George says "the fact that the market for players is not free is irrelevant." So Labor costs are not an input to the final value of a product? The product is Duke Basketball. Coach K is in a position to reap a larger share of the market value then he is due because labor (player) costs are effectively zero.

One really significant difference between free agency in baseball and the market for history professors.

In baseball, performance is generally measurable along a set of widely agreed-upon dimensions, and skill in those dimensions is generally rewarded. In history, there is no generally agreed-upon set of dimensions, and even among those who agree on the dimensions, there is considerable disagreement about how people rate. As a result, the system is almost entirely political.