In today’s TMQ, Gregg Easterbrook suggests that college coaches should be given an incentive to graduate football players. I’m a little leery of this. I think football factory schools will simply enroll athletes in even easier courses and increase the pressure on faculty to pass them — meaning we’ll have a bunch of college grads who can’t read their degrees. I can also see a danger of greedy coaches harassing and bullying players who are struggling in classes if they have money on the line.

But if we want to go that way, here’s a simple idea. A college coach’s salary is his base salary multiplied by the graduate rate. So Nick Saban’s salary might be something like $4 million times is 0.67 graduation rate or $2.7 million.