The University of Texas is giving a $2 million yearly boost to the man who (a) discovered a cure for cancer, (b) created an infallible program to end the violence in the Mideast, or (c) coached a football team into the national championship game.

It's not the fault of Mack Brown, who will be receiving $5 million annually that his specialization is teaching kids how to score touchdowns or, need be, keep others from scoring them instead of teaching them to score on an exam.

It's the educational system's fault.

As David Letterman proves with his $20 million yearly stipend, entertainment pays considerably more than being a CPA or even a DDS. That's what college sports is, entertainment.

It's also a provider of income. Or, if you heed some of the faculty at Cal, who believe the school shouldn't be paying for athletics, outgo.

There's a bit of hypocrisy in undergraduate competition, not that the phenomenon is particularly recent.

Once upon a time, college sports, the major ones, football and basketball, involved students, not recruits.

In 1869, young men from Rutgers and Princeton faced each other in what historically is called the first college football game. They already were in school, to study, not brought in to run the single wing.

But somebody found out quickly enough, if you wanted to win, you needed people from the playgrounds, not the chemistry labs.

By the 1920s, there already were tales of athletes who went to one institution for four years, changed their names and enrolled in another. Enormous stadiums were erected. Coaches such as Knute Rockne and Fielding Yost, in effect Mack Brown's predecessors, were idolized.

All that was before television and its hundreds of millions of dollars in rights fees. Saturday's Heroes, the players were called, and in truth they gained more recognition for their schools than all the Nobel Prizes and other academic awards ever could.

But what did it have to do with learning? Nothing. "Football,'' sniffed a philosopher, Elbert Hubbard, "a sport that bears the same relation to education as bullfighting does to agriculture.''

At Cal, which some choose to call the University of California, Berkeley, professors voted to support a non-binding resolution that called for an end to administrative subsidies for athletics. The Golden Bears have been a football power the last half-dozen years, going to bowl games.

The counter-arguments are long-standing. You don't get 60,000 people to listen to an English professor speak. And what about all those Rhodes Scholars and academic All-Americans, who can conjugate a verb well and can catch a touchdown pass?

We're a competitive country, starting with Pop Warner and Little League and going on to high school. Whatever thoughts the reformers have of de-emphasizing football or at places such as Kentucky or Kansas, basketball, are irrelevant. It's like trying to stop Niagara Falls. Or, dare I say, Colt McCoy?

At Florida and Alabama, and Texas, the rewards, financial and egotistical, are from football, not graduate degrees. Penn State is jacking up prices to sit in premium seats at the stadium. Think that gimmick would work for seats in a lecture hall?

USA Today ran a series on the salaries of top coaches, which, naturally far exceed that of administrators, Mack Brown, Nick Saban of Alabama, Pete Carroll of USC , Urban Meyer of Florida earning well into the millions.

One recalls the response of Babe Ruth when in 1930 the Babe was told he made more money than President Hoover. "I know, but I had a better year than Hoover.''

Nobody in the season of '09 has had a better year than Mack Brown and Texas, although Florida, Texas A&M, Connecticut and Boise State have had comparable years, unbeaten to this point.

For what they do, certainly the men who coach those teams are worth the money. But does what they do equate to what a college is designed to do?

Only a few days ago, Hofstra dropped football. Not long before that, Northeastern University did the same. Through the last few decades, so did UC Santa Barbara, University of San Francisco and numerous other institutions.

The programs became too expensive, too unwieldy. The programs became unaffordable. The programs became unacceptable.

It's different in Europe. With a rare exception, a crew race, a golf or rugby match, between Cambridge and Oxford in England, there is no such thing as intercollegiate sport.

The Sorbonne hasn't been No. 1 in anything if you don't include academics in France. Pay a man $5 million who teaches people how to carry an inflated ball? Sacre bleu!

But here, we give scholarships to people who can run, jump and tackle. It's the American way, and it's never going to change. Which is why Mack Brown became the first $5 million man in college sports. Study that.