Pundits tell us that “all politics is local.” For the most part, so is news. As the globe shrinks, there is a growing tendency for things that happen elsewhere to find a way into a local hopper.

You step on a lump in the rug in, say, Austin, Texas, or Norman, Okla., and it just might pop up in Lawrence. Take faculty and football salaries, for example. You might not believe what you’re going to read.

I ran across a previous column which said it would cost Kansas University about $3 million to make a changeover from the Terry Allen regime to a new order.

That included about $1 million to pay off Allen and his staff; about $1 million for an annual package for the new head man; another $1 million to hire the big-time staff dictated in today’s Big 12 Conference.

The one-mill layout for the head coach is not unusual if you figure Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops is getting $2 million-plus, Kansas State’s Bill Snyder’s bonanza is at least $1.5 million, Texas’s Mack Brown draws down at least $1.5 million, Nebraska’s Frank Solich, $1.1 million, and Texas A&M’s R.C. Slocum $1.1 million. Missouri’s Gary Pinkel was in the $900,000 range last year and probably will be over $1 million soon. Mark Mangino of KU isn’t starving. So far, of course, those non-Mangino teams have winning records in 2002.

None of that staggered me too much. Then I got into the compensation for assistants.

At Oklahoma, eight of the nine full-time assistants make more than $100,000 a year. The average OU assistant’s salary is $129,333, which is $48,033 more than the average annual salary of that university’s full professors. Any wonder a lot of talented, hard-working faculty people on most campuses are less than enchanted by football?

Now to Austin, where the annual salaries of the Texas U. assistants range from $113,668 to $198,640. The average is $135,126, or $41,026 more than the average salary of a full professor at “this prestigious academic entity.”

We’re talking assistant football coaches. None of them has succeeded in a laboratory to cure or even control AIDS, cancer or mad cow disease, the way a lot of $40,000-type (if they’re lucky) people are trying to do. There are no Fulbright scholars or Nobel Laureates among them, you know, the kinds of vital things faculty people do in so many fields. Sure, football coaches can teach important lessons in life, but millions of good professors have accomplished some rather notable things in that realm, too.

What about public school teachers, who are so horribly underpaid? In many cases the truly good ones deserve the kind of money college people get. Not many of them are blessed by six-figure intakes.

OK, we stepped on the Austin and Norman lumps in the football salary carpet. That created a bump in the Lawrence rug where a new coach and staff are working to rebuild. There’s a local element in most news.

The average salary for the nine full-time Mark Mangino assistants is just a shade over $104,000. The average annual salary for KU’s full-time professors is $84,400 (at Texas it’s $98,800). There’s bad news and worse news: Football aides here average about $20,000 more per year than full professors; KU’s professorship scale is fourth from last in the Big 12.

At KU, assistant professors average $50,900 a year while associate profs get $59,600. Sound right to you? And Kansas isn’t setting the football world on fire yet.

Football assistants aren’t the only guys around the league who draw heat. Kansas athletic director Al Bohl has a $255,000 annual salary, which was boosted $5,000 to put him ahead of the new Kansas State AD, who was hired first. That’s easily the highest salary on the KU campus in or out of sports.

The KU wage-and-hour caper that has generated more caustic rhetoric than any other in recent years is the $195,000 being paid to Janet Murguia, the relatively new executive vice chancellor in charge of university relations. Double the average full professor’s salary, to $168,800; that still leaves a $26,200 gap. What’s she do?

Heck, Murguia is making more than at least three of the presidents at board of regents schools in the state. The jock contingent isn’t the only one around here, and throughout the Big 12, that creates understandable resentment among faculty people.

Sure, times have changed, but on Thanksgiving Day 1957, Kansas hired Jack Mitchell from Arkansas at a whopping $15,000 a year on a five-year deal. This was the HEAD coach, not any assistants, which now average seven times that amount.

Phog Allen barely topped $10,000 before retirement; Dick Harp succeeded him at $7,500. Jerry Waugh left the Lawrence High basketball job to become Harp’s aide at $5,500; Max Rife took a $400 cut from his Inman job to succeed Waugh at Lawrence High at $4,500, and had to teach, too.

True, faculty people were bitching then, too, about athletic coaches getting too much money. Most facultonians, even the tenured full profs, weren’t getting much more than $10,000 a year, if that.

But a $48,000 black hole at Oklahoma, a $41,000 gap at Texas and a $20,000 difference at Kansas, man, that’s fathomable reason for resentment.

Jack Mitchell settled his “lifetime” contract in 1966 for a $56,000 payout over four years and is STILL the last grid coach to leave here with a winning record.

Terry Allen was paid well here, considering the weak record, and walked off with about a $320,000 nest egg. Even ex-AD Bob Frederick, with his $166,000 teaching settlement, didn’t fare that well.

Something’s out of balance, folks, even if we win.