Small consolation, Tennessee fans – at least Dave Hart hasn’t gotten taken this badly.
The cost of a football victory keeps climbing for Kansas.This season, the university paid Charlie Weis $2.5 million for one win — the highest cost per victory among schools whose teams won at least one game, according to an annual analysis of football coaches’ compensation. Kansas paid Turner Gill $1.05 million for each of two wins last season, after paying Gill $700,000 for each of three wins in 2010.
The best part of this story is that it’s actually the continuation of a trend at Kansas.
Kansas is the only Bowl Subdivision school among the top five in cost inefficiency in each of the past three seasons.
This season, KU paid over $1 million more per win more than the school that had the lowest rate of return last season.
That is freakin’ awesome, my friends. If I were an AD who found myself in the market for a new football coach at the same time Kansas was, I’d make sure the Jayhawks hired first, just to get a name off the board.
Get The Picture 
I bet Mangino is laughing his sizable ass off as we speak. Chalk one up for not canning a guy that made your program relevant even if he physically assaulted players and/or ate some.
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I had to read the last bit a couple of times before it clicked. Then I laughed out loud.
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Wonder how far down the list Wies is for UT?
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Ha. Laughed at that.
He must be getting close to the top by now. Schematic advantage and all.
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What a Christmas present that hire would be for Dawg fans everywhere!
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With all due respect, it seems like the entire process of hiring, firing, and wooing college coaches seems deeply deeply flawed. On one hand, I understand all the reasons why tenures are shortening (more money for buyouts,), but it seems like all that is happening is the same ADs are using the same flawed approach to hiring and compensating coaches.
Further, I recognize the value of a “proven” commodity, and when Bama made Nick Saban the offer he could not refuse to leave Miami, it made sense. That said, it seems to me that college football ADs are basically making the identical mistake that NBA GMs made and needed a lockout to undo. They used superstar pay as a measuring stick and began handing out expensive contracts to the NBA’s “middle” class.
That is all that is happening here. Why the hell is Purdue paying Darrell Hazell of Kent St more than $2M per year? Isn’t giving him the opportunity to coach in the Big Ten with a marginal raise sufficient? If he wins 8 games at purdue and his teams show all the qualities of well coached teams that significantly “outplay” their talent and is demonstrating an ability to upgrade his talent, then you should pay him accordingly, but it seems to me that is LOT of money to pay a coach whose team has the following statistical profile. Notice the turnover margin…the defense recovered 15 of 21 fumbles….which is about 4 or 5 too many based on luck. more importantly, look at the pass efficiency, and the ypp on offense and defense. does that look like an 11 win team? Yet here the guy is getting $2M per year.
http://web1.ncaa.org/football/exec/rankingSummary?year=2012&org=331
Further, the same theory could trickle down to the coordinator and asst coach level. Bielma criticized Wisconsin for not paying his asst coaches. Consider that we let a highly paid OL coach walk out the door and replaced him with a guy from UAB. All things being equal there is ALMOST no difference in their resumes but time. Searels played at auburn in the late 80s, and friend came along a decade later. they both played and trained under OL coaches that fit the profile. We are probably paying Friend 1/3 of what we paid Searels. Is he in line for a raise? Perhaps. At what price do you let these guys walk?
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Fair point. Teams want to be big timers, so they overpay hoping to strike gold. When middling teams pay longshots big bucks, the big guys have to pay proven coaches more, and the cycle continues until someone blows the whole thing up. <—-THIS WON'T HAPPEN AS LONG AS FANS KEEP PAYING
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I disagree. Richt’s and Bobo’s pay was flat concerning coaches, especially in the SEC. No one else followed that “lead” and came down in price plus UGA fans still bitched.
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Bowen’s Revenue Theory of Costs
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I’d wait until we see the end result before making too much fun. Anyone around here remember our last search for a defensive coordinator? We made several high-profile whiffs on big name candidates before finally finding an under-the-radar hire who turned out to be the right man.
Then again, given UT’s last two hires, I don’t know why I should expect this saga to play out any differently.
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I think an AD should pay a coach for each win. Beating a cupcake gets you X dollars. Beating a conference foe gets you more x dollars. You could have it set up to where the coach wold be one of the highest in the country if they have an undefeated season. This also might prevent a coach from looking ahead and dropping a game to a lesser foe.
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Hot dang! Bowling for Dollars! is back. Who knows, might work. How do we deconstruct the present contracts to get to that point?
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I guess you implement it with a new hire.
You want to coach here? Well, this is what we’re going to do…
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Obviously, the notion of incentive based compensation is not a new one. I guess the question for me would be more of how a base and bonus would be structured. There could be ways of structuring things over multi season.
If we use UGA for a moment….simply because its what we all know best. We have a LOT of benchmarks for what one could define as an average or good season. Over a 25 year time period, Vince Dooley won 200 games (in an era with both 10 and 11 game schedules but also a 6 game SEC. Obviously, that penciled out to about 8-3 on average. Goff was well below that. Donnan averaged around those same numbers, and Richt has significantly outperformed that. Personally, I would argue 9-3 Is performing average (as the 12 game is a cupcake) as a UGA football coach. Anything above that is worth paying for. Certainly SEC east and SEC conference titles are outperforming (and obviously we know what winning the SEC has become synonomous with). Essentially, you could have a base package of $1M for going 9-3 or worse, a $2M bonus for playing in the SEC championship game, a $4M bonus for winning the SEC championship, and a $6M bonus for the BCS title. to me thats a better deal as an AD than handing out a $3M contract with a $2M bonus for winnning the SEC. Obviously, a similar pay scale could be crafted for any program, and quite frankly that scale can be adjusted at the beginning of the tenure of coaches to account for where the program is (ie., are you getting Miami after Jimmy Johnson OR say UGA after Ray Goff?)
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If you take out Donnan’s first season (to be fair and give the guy a chance to get the Goof out of ’em) Donnan was 35-13 in his last 4 seasons–a winning percentage of about 73%. CMR’s winning percentage is about the same overall as Donnan’s but CMR has had a lot more success than Donnan over UGA’s traditional rivals.
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