Stan Geiger

Coaches Get Richer, and Richer, and...

Did you watch the Big 12 title game between Texas and Nebraska? I did. It was a good game, I thought. I find it refreshing to see teams in the Big 12 playing defense again. But the last drive of the game was simply appalling.

Texas needed only a field goal to win the conference and go to the big show. Nebraska gave the Horns two huge gifts---first launching the kickoff out of bounds then getting a 15 yard personal foul. Then came maybe the worst example of clock management I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t believe what I was watching. Texas just completely blew off, like, the last minute of time. Colt McCoy finally got around to throwing a pass out of bounds to stop the clock with one second left. Texas had a timeout in the bank that was never used.

Mack Brown nearly blew it all---the undefeated season, the Big 12 trophy and a shot at the national title---because he had his head up his rear. That notwithstanding, the coach got a raise. The coach got a big raise. He is now guaranteed to make at least $5 million per year for the remainder of his contract, which runs through 2016.

Brown took the Texas job in 1997 for a salary of $750,000. His salary has increased more than 500 percent in 12 years.

The university was set to give Brown a one-time payment of $2 million. The regents decided to give him $2 million every year instead. The new deal doesn’t affect the $100,000 per year automatic raise that is already in the contract. So---assuming no more lucrative changes---Brown will be making closer to $6 million by the time his contract runs out.

And, oh, by the way, if Brown’s luck holds out and Texas beats Alabama, he gets to pass go and collect $450,000 in bonus money.

The standard university justification for making multimillionaires out of coaches has been issued. Brown’s pay doesn’t come from tuition-paying students or taxpaying citizens; it comes from athletic revenue. So I guess what university officials are saying is that in spite of the university charging students through the nose to attend and in spite of the university gobbling up tons of tax money every year the money generated by athletics belongs to coaches exclusively. Lovely.

Let me throw three more names at you: Charlie Weis, Pete Carroll and Bob Stoops. How much did those three guys, counting everything, garner between them for coaching one season of football? Oh, probably about $15 million. And that comes to about a million bucks a loss.

Weis stunk up the joint so badly he got canned. But reports say he had 6 years left on his contract. I wonder how much it cost Notre Dame to fire the guy.

KOTV reported, a few days back, that Bob Stoops is being paid $4.3 million for this season. And that the combined pay for his 9 assistants comes to $2.6 million. That’s $6.9 million going to 10 government employees in a single year. It takes the equivalent of the full-time tuition from over a thousand OU students just to pay the football coaches.

I heard a report earlier in the year about the University of Tennessee. That university hired a new head coach. He promptly turned around and hired his daddy as defensive coordinator at a salary of $1.2 million. It’s no longer good enough for head coaches to be multimillionaires, it seems. Now assistants are getting into the game.

It just gets crazier with each passing year. And there is no end in sight.

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