Now We Know Why Napier Has Not Been Fired

If they are tired of buyouts quit freakin guaranteeing these insane contracts. It’s not that complicated.

 

That Wall St. Journal article is paywalled, but there is a nice big photo of our Billy to go with it.

 

It’s not hindsight, it’s been a problem for over a decade and not only are they still doing it, it’s gotten worse. It’s idiocy.

 

Jumbo Fisher stopped and said hello with a fist full of hundreds!

 

That is part of it. But only part. The other major part is nobody knows what a good hire looks like.

Administrations are playing a longer game than "who can win a lot next season."

 

It's also not that simple.

Over the past 15 years, if you wanted to hire what was considered a quality coach, you had to pony up a big buyout, or they weren't coming, or so Jimmy Sexton convinced you. So the Universities coughed up the cash because they know football fans only care about winning. If they miss on the coach everyone wanted because they were cheap, there was hell to pay. Just look at this board.

The coaches got a lot of leverage and it became accepted practice in the industry to ink big buyouts.

And it kept escalating. Napier's buyout is actually reasonable compared to some. Check out what ATM paid dumbo, or FSU owes Norvell, or LSU owes Kelly.

It's easy to say don't do it, but most of the people on this board would have strokes or heart attacks if we missed on a coach because we went cheap and he went elsewhere and won.

So... who's the problem?

 

Cool idea bro, but some already accuse the administration of "cheaping out" on coaches. You're not getting anyone the fanbase would want without sizable guaranteed money. Even if you did manage to snag some no name that turned out to be successful you wouldn't keep him without sizable guaranteed money. I don't know what the threshold is for "that complicated" but it's certainly more complicated than you're making it.

 

We could offer a coach 1.5 million per win with no buyout and we would come out light years better financially and make a good coach insanely rich.
The problem with the current market is that it’s not the good coaches walking away with the crazy money after a bad year or two, it’s mediocre ones. Legitimately good coaches don’t ever trigger the buyout. None of our last four coaches were credentialed enough to warrant 8 figure buyouts, but they all had them. Tennessee was paying three coaches at one time with buyouts, and none of them had high major success before going there. Napier hasn’t even had a winning season at a P5 school, and we’re in the hook for nearly forty million still. Would Napier not have taken the UF job had we offered a more reasonable buyout? Did he have top end schools lining up to steal him? And if his choices were say Illinois with a big buyout or Aug with a smaller one, do we really want the guy that doesn’t bet on himself and takes the lesser job?
The only credentialed coach in recent memory who got paid out was Jimbo, and he got plucked from a sub 500 team to take that job with a 75 million dollar guarantee. He wanted out of Tally for a whole host of reasons and A&M massively overpaid.
After Fisher, the next five highest buyouts to date have been Malzahn, Orgeron, Weiss, Taggart and Herman. Orgeron at least had a good year, but seriously?

It’s a completely broken system. Honestly what I’ve been pondering lately is whether the NCAA can just put a cap on coach’s salaries to stop this lunacy. But they couldn’t even clear our European point guard before the season started, so I’m not holding my breath.

 

The NCAA has exactly zero ability to put a cap on anything. You're not the first person to think of offering heavy incentives, yet nobody has done it. That's probably not just because the people involved are too stupid.

 

Well said!

 

I believe auburn had shown interest just as they had with Kiffy. Theres more job opportunities than good coaches and most will end up around 500 by law of averages. Is is legal to cap salaries in any job market?

 

All agents and lawyers.

Ask the average coach, if you move here, you’re going to make an extra 3mil a year, but if you suck, you’re gone. Bidding wars, lmfao. There are so many retreads getting ready to have a blow out. Going fishing for bbq sauce now.

An extra 3 mil you say…

 

I think the biggest reason schools have to agree to guaranteed contracts is due to the fact that the same agency represents most high quality candidates.

It’s hard to negotiate from a position of power when all the job candidates are represented by a single entity.

It’s a rigged system and I’m not sure how to go about fixing it.

 

Many jobs have a salary cap, I know mine does, once I hit my cap I can’t go higher without a promotion or a COLA adjustment to the range. And in sports salary caps are common. More for players than coaches, but if the SEC for example threw up a rule that said all coaching salaries combined for the 10 on field coaches can’t exceed 5 million (random number), I can’t imagine it would be illegal, especially if it were voted on by the schools. Of course that would be competitive suicide, but it could potentially work up from the smaller conferences so that us and the big10 could set the highest bars.

 

Nfl has a cap but its a percentage of profits so not really a number. Not sure how that works in the corporate world. For me, its free market and i can charge whatever is agreed upon. Tgat would be strange if i had set prices tgat all had to adhere to.

 

By the way, something else I’ve thought about over the years. But Sexton wins in part because this is all he does, an AD has 100 jobs, this is but one. It’s an unfair fight, even if he has legal counsel.
If there were a truly enterprising sports lawyer out there, someone could offer their services for say 500k a negotiation, and be the anti Sexton in every one of these. Someone with as much sports agent experience as him to be his foil in every coaching search. Might need a couple of them if there were multiple schools bidding. But 500k would be worth it dozens of times over, he or she could probably charge way more and still have it be a good deal.

 

Yes, but it requires collective bargaining. That's why the pro sports leagues can have salary caps. But NCAA coaches have no need or reason to collectively bargain, so it won't happen.

 

It’s not based on profits but revenue. And the league could do the same thing, based off a percentage of TV revenue for the conference. That would take unhinged boosters out of the mix.
And yes I realize none of this is happening anytime soon, I am only saying there are solutions if enough people got fed up with it. But for some bizarre reason the status quo doesn’t seem to change, no matter how ludicrous it becomes.