Enter another school president fretting over assistant coaches’ rising salaries.
… South Carolina president Harris Pastides said he is concerned about the cost of doing business in the SEC, particularly when it comes to paying assistant football coaches.
“Even with the ESPN contract, I cannot continue to look our faculty and my staff in the eye — we’ve had no raises for quite a few years now — and say they are some subsidiary organization,” Pastides said Thursday at the SEC spring meetings.
Yeah, but, wait a minute, sir… didn’t your school just make its defensive coordinator one of the highest paid assistant coaches in the country? Is that the problem?
… Pastides stressed he and the board had no misgivings about rewarding the 58-year-old Johnson, whose defenses ranked in the top four in the SEC and top 15 nationally his first two seasons at USC.
But Pastides said several board members were concerned about the direction of assistant salaries in general. Four SEC defensive coordinators received new contracts this offseason worth at least $600,000. A fifth — former USC and current Mississippi defensive chief Tyrone Nix — will make $500,000 this year.
In other words, his guy is worth every penny South Carolina is shelling out. It’s all the other SEC schools which are overpaying their assistant coaches. The bastards!
And besides… they’re so close in Columbia, how can he begrudge the money?
… As for the Gamecocks, Pastides figures the money will be well spent if Steve Spurrier can take USC to its first SEC championship.
“Steve has slowly advanced the program, and I like to think we’re on the perch now. It used to be the upper echelon of the league in football was way up there, and how do we get there?” Pastides said. “We’re not there yet. Whether that’s one, two or three years away, the answer that they gave me was that coach Johnson was a key ingredient.”
I keep wondering how people like this wind up occupying the positions they do.
Get The Picture 
Because they are blowhard bureaucrats who take advantage of all the academics who believe everything is nice and flowery. University administration is where lightweight politicians go to flourish.
Don’t know if you have ever seen the show “Parks and Recreation,” but there was an episode a couple of months ago where they got all of the living, past heads of the Dept of Parks and Recreation together for a ceremony. It pretty much sums up lightweight politicians.
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I’ll bet they all sat down and tried to work up a 20 year plan, with presentation boards.
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Coach Johnson probably had a lot better year than any of the mail it in professors and bureaucrats at South Carolina.
Each department has a budget. To the extent each department generates revenue, that gets taken into consideration when they figure out how much they can spend, I would think. To the extent that increased expenditures (better coaches) generate more production (wins) which generate more revenue, I think most business models would consider the increased expenditures to be wise.
Not in academia, I guess. Some guy who’s the leading expert in the southeast on the history of tile grout, and who has tenure, is unhappy because his genius goes unrecognized and uncompensated while the barbarians in cleats are rolling in dough. To which I can only say, duh.
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+2 to you and Charles D, is Pastides kidding? These guys earn their dollars in an open market, and can lose their job because their BOSS doesn’t do his well enough while tenured professors sit on their fat asses forever regardless of their contribution. One only has to look at the flakey politicians who have never held a real job but offer unfounded opinions on everything. Let’s grade their performance (of course you can’t, it’s all soft and mushy) and measure it against that of someone who would do it for much less. I don’t think academia wants to ever be run as an open market. UGA just increased tuition, 16% I believe, despite the state and nation’s economy. Who is being outrageous here? Think they would want to change environments and work hours?
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The main accomplishments of being a university president are raising money and getting buildings built, regardless whether they’re needed. The main qualifications are unknown, but ability to say nothing seems to be important. That last quote combines waffling with classic South Carolina optimism. Nice work.
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“South Carolina president Harris Pastides said he is concerned about the cost of doing business in the SEC”…
Easy solution: Go back to the ACC, we take Clemson’s bigger/better fanbase, and we still have two or four slots to pursue western/southern expansion.
Win-Win. And hell, if Georgia Tech and Wake Forest can win ACC titles, there might even be hope for the Cocks one of these days!
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are these people idiots? Superior is improving the program? just like holtz? wtf?? they are an average of 8-5 and they collapse at the end of every season?
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