As if college football wasn’t ridiculous enough, a recent report shows that assistant coaches are now nearing the $1 million-plus mark for their salaries.

It is bad enough the ludicrous amounts of money that head coaches are making these days, both from the schools and their contracts with equipment companies such as Nike and adidas.

But now assistants need to be paid upwards of $1 million?

While all these coaches and schools are getting rich, although paying those kind of salaries certainly can’t be good for the bottom line at a lot of schools, it’s the players who continue to get the shaft from the NCAA.

I am so sick of the argument of “they go to school for free and they get an education” it makes me want to throw up.

It is time for all of us to grow up. Most of the kids that go to college to play football are not there for the education, plain and simple. Most of them are there to hone their skills and prep for a career in the National Football League or other pro leagues.

So the theory that they are there for the education is bull and we all know it, although there are still a lot of idealistic people out there who believe that.

Part of the problem with paying people that kind of money at the collegiate level is that in order to keep earning it, they need to produce a winner year in and year out. That type of pressure leads to cutting corners and circumventing the rules.

Yes, I am talking about cheating if I need spell it out for everyone.

Cheating is already rampant in the NCAA, just look at the high profile programs in the news recently. Do you think that if the players were only there for an education that we would need to pay these coaches those types of salaries and keep increasing the pay for assistants?

Of course not. If this truly was amateur athletics we were talking about, coaches would make salaries similar to those in the teaching profession because that is what they do. They teach these kids a skill. That skill just happens to be football.

There was a time when college football coaches also taught at the university or college they worked for. Those were truly the days when players went to college to earn a degree and work toward getting a good paying job.

Those days my friends are long gone of course and so is the integrity of college athletics.

No one in particular is to blame, although the governing body should shoulder most of the responsibility because they are the ones who let it get out of control.

The problem is our society craves winners and treats winners like a God. Success breed success in our world and the most successful people, companies and athletic programs are raised up and put on a pedestal for all to admire.

The highest paid assistant coaches are in the Southeastern Conference, a conference that has seen its share of adversity in recent years.

Auburn, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, LSU and Georgia all have assistant coaches making more than $700,000 a year and the Tigers’ Gus Malzahn tops the list at a record $1.3 million.

The genie is already out of the bottle, so I am not sure if we can put it back in. What I do know is that we cannot allow these escalating salaries to continue. It will make a bad situation even worse if it goes unchecked.

There are a lot of rules about what student-athletes can and cannot do while playing collegiate sports. Those rules are so strict that it makes it hard for them to even get summer jobs without jumping through so many hoops it seems pointless to even try.

Yet coaches appear to go unchecked. They can continue to reap huge profits off the backs of these kids and the university they represent.

Perhaps it is time to start making some serious rules about the kinds of monies they can make.

Because in the end, it is going to be the kids who suffer and the college football fans, who have to pay the price – literally.

Scott Novak is sports editor for Leader Publications. He can be reached at scott.novak@leaderpub.com.