One more thing about those USA Today salary numbers you should keep in mind this offseason. If you click on ‘Georgia’ at number 18, the chart for what the school has paid/is paying its head coach over the last decade pops up. For your easy reference, here ’tis:
- 2006: $270,000
- 2007: $578,100
- 2009: $809,340
- 2010: $2,811,340
- 2011: $2,811,400
- 2012: $2,811,340
- 2013: $3,200,000
- 2014: $3,200,000
- 2015: $4,000,000
- 2016: $3,753,600
(I have no idea what happened to the 2008 data, but at least you can figure out the parameters of Richt’s paycheck then.)
There is a lot of interesting stuff to unpack there, but there are two things that jump off the plate for me. The first is Richt’s salary in 2006, after what was arguably his most successful run as head coach. To think that someone who had two conference titles in his back pocket, after a twenty-year drought in Athens, could make that little, relatively speaking, is a testament to both the Georgia Way and Richt not having someone like Jimmy Sexton in his corner representing his interests.
Which brings me to item number two.
Kirby Smart isn’t making as much as Mark Richt did in his final year in Athens. But he is making more as a newly minted head coach than Mark Richt did in any of his other fourteen years at Georgia. Those years certainly had their ups and downs, but there are five conference title game appearances, the aforementioned SEC titles and some BCS bowl games in there to consider, none of which appear on Smart’s head coaching resume (yet, hopefully). Put in that light, that’s a tribute both to Sexton’s negotiating skills as well as the high regard Georgia’s movers and shakers have for Smart. And, again, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But unless we’re going to say “that’s why they pay him the big bucks” is merely a punchline and nothing more, throwing out that kind of money has to mean something in context, and from my perspective, perhaps that means we’re entitled to something more from both the head coach and the athletic administration than presenting us with a situation in which talking heads suggest dismissing a season as a throwaway year in pursuit of something bigger and better down the road is its own reward.
You are free to disagree, of course. If you do, though, riddle me this: what kind of pay bump do you think Sexton’s gonna pry out of the big boys the first time Kirby’s coaching in the conference title game?
Get The Picture 
We increased our head coaches salary by a factor of 14 in ten years?
Something seems a little funky with that 2006 number.
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I’d say there’s something funky with the 2007 and 2009 numbers as well (and presumably 2008, if we had that data point). I’m guessing that’s only his “base pay” and not the incentives. For example, a quick google search provides the following link:
http://sports.newsday.com/long-island/data/college/college-football/coaches-salaries/mark-richt/
That shows Richt’s base pay in 2014 was $400,000 but he got another $1 mil from the UGA athletic association for an equipment deal plus $1.5 mil for media obligations, and there are other incentives as well.
I’m not sure why it’s structured like that, but my guess is it’s some sort of financial hocus pocus that, although totally legal, probably looks kind of shady to the average Joe. That’s not an indictment of Richt by any means, I’m sure that’s how all coaches’ contracts are built.
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But what is Ford paying him compared to Richt? If you ask me, Kirby has done a heck of a lot better job selling trucks. Just look around on the roads. That is what counts in Georgia!
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Maybe Kirby should focus more on coaching and less on selling Fords 😉
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I’m thinking those numbers aren’t apples to apples the whole way through the data set.
Your points are all valid, but I’ll bet everything I own that the different in Richt’s 20o6 all in compensation and his 2014 isn’t as large as that indicates.
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Be interesting to see total monies per year paid out to all football coaches and staff. I bet that 2016 number will stick out?
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Interesting post, thanks Senator. I’d like to just respond to this:
“from my perspective, perhaps that means we’re entitled to something more from both the head coach and the athletic administration than presenting us with a situation in which talking heads suggest dismissing a season as a throwaway year in pursuit of something bigger and better down the road is its own reward.”
I have zero problem with complaining about this year’s on the field results.. yes we’re entitled to better. I’ve said before, that I’m giving Kirby a pass this year and I stand by that. It’s not that I’m ok with the head scratching losses and near losses, but I just did not expect much out of a first year head coach on his first job. The puzzling part remains, why no real search? Is UGA the kind of program that needs to hire a unproven coordinator? Why does such get that much money? At the conclusion of the regular season I didn’t feel like bitching about Kirby and his staff.. I wanted to bitch about McGarity and his ‘process’. Because the way this season played out was the opposite of what we were told. Yes, the team is young. Yes the team is deficient…. but this season didn’t feel like we were trying to win games, it felt like Mark Richt 2.0. Let’s continue to do what we do whether it works or not, and down the road we’ll get to where we need to be (but still fall short) right before all the key talent graduates and we’re rebuilding. Hardly the change we were looking for.
Again, time will tell. The new attention to recruiting alone may help us get over that kind of hump, and Kirby just needs time.. but the ‘win now’ mentality we were all told about? Yeah, I call bullshit on that.
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Agree. I was really disappointed we did not show up for 3games. We did not lose to Vandy and GT because they had more talent. Inexcusable losses
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BM/mcgarity have hitched their star to CKS. Not talking flirtation, but real time spent @ the SECCG will pay high dividends over the next two years, plus plenty of equity for CKS. Will also hide mcgarity’s other significant hires. On the other hand…..three years of no shows sends them all down 85 south bound.
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If Kirby works out, then McGarity gets big rewards from a calculated risk. There’s a big difference in being a great assistant and a good head coach. I don’t think we’ve yet seen if Kirby can be a good head coach.
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I tend to agree with most of your observations. However, perhaps more important to me is the fact that we were promised attention to detail and a process that would transform the culture. We were promised a coach who was such an integral part of the Saban’s success that hiring Kirby was the almost like hiring Saban himself. What we saw was a garden variety first year head coach who makes garden variety first year head coach mistakes, coaching a largely unfocused, erratic team. Since when are garden variety first year head coaches worth four million a year?
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that might be true, but suppose King & Spalding decides to get average law students instead of exceptional ones. Do you think the average law student looks at King & Spalding and says “you paid first year associates a starting salary of 115K, but I kind of suck so you should offer me the more reasonable 65K starting salary”
My point is that when Georgia hires a HC, we’re pricing ourselves up. Perhaps if we did some type of Chinese blind offer/accept arrangement where the coach doesn’t know what school he is interviewing with, we could pay based upon his actual worth. But outside of that, when Georgia, Texas, Flarduh, etc. call an agent, the price climbs.
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definite false equivalence on this one. That average law student with no connections would be thrilled at the chance to work at K&S for the resume builder aspect, even if at a discount. “go and work at small firm with no regional reputation for the same amount or go work at K&S for same amount.”
and to further the analogy. We replaced a managing partner with all of his connections and good will built up over 15 years with a first year associate. Also, we’re told that we’ll likely lose 40-50% of our contests over the next 2-3 years. That being said, his billing rate is the same, without any of the experience or track record of success. So we, the customer(I say we generally. I’m not a season ticket holder) are being told to continue to pony up full freight, if not an increase in demands, while Mr. First Year Associate figures out how to access LexisNexis and which floor has the good coffee.
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+1000
Lets throw away all our cases for this year and next because our golden first year associate has quite the propensity to attract really smart interns to help us in the future.
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Berto, I don’t know remember being told we were going to ‘win now.’ In fact, I thought Kirby was pretty clear in his assessment of our deficiencies the moment he walked in. I think our season was part deficiencies and part first year coach. My gut tells me that Mark Richt had become a veteran coach adept at winning games, but he had not built the talent base in a way to compete at an elite level. Richt had learned how to win ugly. That’s not a bad thing, but we didn’t have the experience on the sideline this year to do that.
As for the search, I don’t get the angst of UGA fans over this. Look around. USC hired a coordinator. South Carolina hired what had been a failure in the SEC. LSU just hired a defensive line coach. Baylor hired a guy from Temple. Oregon hired a guy from USF. Texas hired the hot name, but they hired the hot name a few years ago and that failed miserably. And Herman just went 9-3 in the AAC.
We could have gone after a few names: Dantonio, Shaw, Helfrich. Who else? Were we really going to hire Fuente, with little recruiting acumen in the Deep South and a couple of inexplicable losses at Memphis last year even with a loaded roster for that league? What we did do was avoid the embarrassment that LSU went through with Fisher and Herman and so many other schools have gone through.
The dollars out there are precisely the reason it’s getting harder to snag coaches. And how do we know we didn’t gauge interest with some of those names? That LSU hired Orgeron should be an alarm going off to the big schools. People aren’t knocking down the door these days for high pressure jobs when they’re paid handsomely at jobs with much less pressure.
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Georgia, we’ve been told time and time again, is one of the best jobs, if not the best job, in the country. (It certainly was the top opening after USC stuck with Helton.) Evidently all that means to you is making sure McGarity doesn’t get shown up interviewing several candidates. That’s as succinct a description of the Georgia Way as I can see.
Georgia may not win with Smart, but at least it wasn’t embarrassed by the hire. Man, no wonder the future looks so bright.
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My point is that we don’t know that we didn’t place some phone calls to the likes of Dantonio or Shaw. Maybe we did and we got a cool response and figured it wasn’t worth it.
Yes, UGA is one of the best jobs in the country, but that doesn’t mean what it used to in today’s market. If I were to rank jobs, my top five would look something like this:
Texas
Florida
Alabama
Ohio St.
LSU
3 of those 5 have gone through recent transitions and had trouble landing someone. Florida has done so twice, and though they have tons of money, the right conference, great weather, and a recruiting hotbed, they’ve had trouble hiring big names.
We don’t really know our process because none of us work for the UGAA.
If we thought Kirby was the guy and had done our due diligence with his vision of the program, why fart around with other candidates and risk losing our #1 option who could get swept up by another offer.
I just didn’t have a problem with it all. I thought, if Kirby’s the guy we want, go get him. And I think that was the case, and I’m cool with that. I’ve said for the last several years that my nightmare scenario for UGA football was that we didn’t get Mike or Kirby when we could and we watch both of them win multiple SEC titles at somewhere like UT and LSU.
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I know the athletic department received some feelers from interested parties it didn’t pursue.
Glad you didn’t have any nightmares, though you must have been on pins and needles when Sexton leaked word that Smart was talking to South Carolina.
Also, I notice that none of your top five programs had openings when Georgia hired Smart. Field was pretty open, then, wasn’t it?
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I promise you that on November 30, 2015 Kirby Smart was willing to wait a week to see how interested his alma mater was in him before biting on any other offers.
I hope for Mrs. McGarity’s checkbook’s sake Sexton never gets Greg McGarity across the poker table from him.
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@sUGArdaddy: UGA has a better geographic recruiting base than any team on your list. Some of the others can recruit better nationally at this time, but from the standpoint of recruiting close-by players, none of them beat Georgia. Yes Florida and Texas are better states for recruiting than Georgia, but Florida has FSU and Miami to contend with, while Texas has A&M, Baylor, and TCU. Additionally, none of the schools save Ohio State have won as many games over the last 20 years. Georgia has also won fewer championships over that time period than the other schools. That shows me that UGA can win, and if the right guy comes in and wins big, he’ll own the state. If a coach had offers from your entire list plus UGA, he’d be well advised to come to Athens (money and other considerations being equal of course).
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My feeling with this is that they made a calculation that Kirby would be easiest to sell to a divided fanbase. Half the fanbases thought (and still thinks) that would should have kept Richt.
Whoever came in, regardless of how many people we interviewed, was going to criticized by that 50% of the fanbase no matter what. Kirby being an alum was partially someone that they were probably thinking should have some built in goodwill.
Whether that was a smart assumption or thought process is obviously debatable.
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Based on what?
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My feeling. I have no hard evidence. I’ve stated before how I think McGs time at Florida and then the 2010 season impacted his opinion of Richt, but he had to realize how divisive firing him would be.
Whether he believed that the only way he could move in was to bring in an alumnus or not is total speculation. I honestly have no idea. Like I said, it’s just my feeling. I think McG was ready to move on and if the boosters said they’d sign off in Kirby, he was going to pull the trigger.
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I feel hiring a proven winner, as head coach, would have been the best way to appease a divided fan-base. Good-Ole-boy-hires rarely work out for the best.
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Yep.
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Jim Donnan and Butch Jones were proven winners.
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That means it’s all the same, right? Next time, save a few bucks and just hire the first coach who walks through the door.
This is not a serious rebuttal.
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My point is that coaching hires are crapshoots. For every assistant that turns out to be a bust, I can show you a Charlie Strong or Butch Davis at UNC.
If you think we should have gone after someone with head coaching experience, that’s fine. I would probably have preferred that too.
But to believe that a “proven head coach” would have even guaranteed to do better this year or going forward I believe is a just as much of a leap of faith as believing that Kirby is destined to succeed just because he spent time with Saban.
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It would have been nice if McGarity had made an effort to hire Smart as the result of an informed opinion.
You say there may be no guarantees in hiring, but considering we’re still waiting for McGarity’s first successful head coaching hire to emerge, that may be getting close to one.
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I’m not defending McG. And his fate is most likely tied to Kirby’s.
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McGarity isn’t on the hot seat for any of his other coaching hires, or for UGA’s steady slide down the Director’s Cup rankings, so I wouldn’t be making any pronouncements about his fate.
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A flop of a hire for football coach is different from a flop in volleyball, no?
Look, I think McG is so far out of his depth that he doesn’t know which way is up. But he fired a deeply popular coach and has ramped up spending for football to levels never seen in Athens. Maybe you’re right and he’s safe regardless, but I don’t see how. And if that is the case, it says more about Morehead than it doesn’t anyone else.
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Your argument is a straw man. Nobody has ever used the word “guarantee” in analyzing the hiring process. But, Kirby Smart, predictably, has looked like a first year head coach. UGA signed up for on the job training and that’s what it got. That’s something that a proven head coach has put behind him. I won’t use the word “guarantee,” but I’ll be very surprised is Hermann misuses timeouts at Texas next year, like a first year head coach might.
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Dude, you clearly didn’t watch the end of the Memphis game. Herman horribly mismanaged the clock. You picked a horrible example.
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I love your blog Senator, and will read it either way, but at this point I am failing to understand why we keep rehashing this argument that B-M and McGarity should have done a more thorough coaching search. Now we are shifting to how much they pay the guy? In this current environment? If Kirby fails, then McGarity goes with him… along with his so-called piss poor management of UGA athletics. Problem solved. The next search will be administered differently. Right?
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I don’t have any problem with Smart’s pay. That’s not the point of the post. The header is self-explanatory, or at least I think it is.
As far as what happens if Smart doesn’t succeed, your guess is as good as mine.
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Finally, a voice of reason. Thank you SUGAR.
Berto = Bluto as is Horse = beaten to death
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Remember reading about Smart’s first meeting with the team and he said the difference between UGA and Alabama was the narrow width between the finger and thumb he led up, and that difference was the effort and attention to detail difference?
Sure, that was not a “promising wins” comment, but it contrary to the Dantzler/Butler assessments about the overwhelming lack of talent excuse.
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I’m just glad he didn’t take a page from the Bobby Knight book of coaching and show the team a recently used wad of toilet paper and compare the quality of the team to that of the contents of the paper.
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Man, Gaskill, I’m glad you reminded us of that. NOW it’s a lack of talent! Coaches should be careful of what they say until they have some games under their belt.
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Well, promise might be too strong of a word there, but he said the goal was to mold around the team, not force the team to adapt. Do what they can to win now. Looking back on this season… does that seem like what this coaching staff did? Not just no, but hell no.
Mark Richt almost always needed to build. He’d have some pretty damn good years with some almost unbelievable down years that fueled hot seat talk. Perhaps Kirby’s attention to recruiting will help us avoid those downward slips Richt had, but right now, it’s like hurry up and wait for the talent to mature all over again. If that’s what we’ve got under Kirby, then whatever.. but it’s a far cry from what was talked about. Time will tell, but I’m not seeing where things are so different.. hopefully that’s a ‘not yet’.
If this works out, McGarity will be the luckiest sonofabitch around.
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heyberto, it is not up to us to give Smart a pass or call for his head. Unless he cheats or commits a criminal act he will be our coach in 2017 and 2018, and it should be that way.
The reality is that on December 8, 2018 he will be fired or retained based upon the 2018 season. Win the SEC championship and the 2016 results will not get him fired. Go 7-6 in 2018 and all the “give him a pass in 2016” attitudes won’t save his job.
The harder case will be if he is 8-5 in 2017 and 9-3 at this point in 2018. Even then, the underachieving 2016 season really will not be that important compared to the trajectory of the program by December 8, 2016.
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I think there is still cautious optimism with Smart. Certainly hope. We all know the scenario you’ve laid out is the new reality of UGA football, and I’m ok with that. I’m not calling for his head, but I will give him a pass for this year if he’s truly building. I think the bigger issue is McGarity hitching everything to the Kirby wagon with no search at all. I find that almost criminal in a program that is thought of as UGA’s is (the Senator said this above in a comment). It’s like McGarity hit the panic button when SC made a move for Smart and didn’t go look at anything else. All for a guy that the best you could really say about the guy is he was arguably the assistant with the most potential. If you’re Georgia and you’re going to shell out $4 Mil for a head coach, this is the route you go without talking to ANYONE else? I’m not saying I’m rooting against Smart, and I’m not saying he’s a bad hire. I’m saying we don’t know yet and McGarity put all his eggs in an unproven basket, without question… that’s baffling to me.
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My point is whether the readers of Get The Picture are cautiously optimistic or wildly pessimistic at this point is irrelevant to Smart’s coaching longevity at Georgia.
I do not think that how he did in 2016 has any bearing on his longevity, either. How he does in 2017 will have some bearing, but how he does in 2018 is really the key to his future.
Anonymous posts on Get The Picture by folks such as me and you do not matter regarding Smart’s career. As of December 8, 2016 Smart controls his own destiny, as it should be.
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Exactly. And McGarity tried to split the baby. Instead of just owning the process and stating that Smart was the guy all along, he wimps out and hires a search firm just to give him cover to hire Smart without talking to anybody else.
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Given the landscape of the sec east in 2017, IMHO, UGA should/better have a record exceeding 9-3. Just considering how bad the east was this year, 2017 appears equal in value. I’m just sayin’…….
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As long as i am hoping about the 2017 record I might as well hope for 15-0!
Expect it? Nor, but no harm in hoping.
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That two million dollar bump between 2009 and 2010 does seem unusual. Surely there are other pieces to the puzzle, right? And aren’t coaches’ salaries market driven? Didn’t Saban’s entry back into college football drive much of this? CKS only gets paid what the market allows. And I certainly agree with everyone else that one year as a first year head coach, with a freshman quarterback, does not a career make. The future, IMO, looks bright.
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Just look at Alabama’s revenue before Saban got there and look at it since. I wold be curious what Michigan and Ohio State’s are looking like, same with Clemson. I would say Nick Saban is the best investment in sports. Everyone else is just trying to find the same pot of gold.
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It also helped that Saban didn’t have an ass like Michael Adams around, chilling donor enthusiasm.
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So true ! The Rugby team finally got their field back, the one given by Fred Davidson and taken away by Adams , thank you Jere Morehead.
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Agree on Saban, but can assure you Kirby ain’t Saban. McG using this to up contribution and prices,”like to have shit when I opened my envelope this week”. For me it is an easy decision, cut back on tickets and contribution and let somebody else enjoy them, it just was not fun this year.
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The numbers from USA Today are wrong. UGA coaching salaries are broken down into three categories: base salary, equipment sponsorship, and media requirements. His first contract in 2001 was 5 years at $750K a year. The numbers they are reporting start off as just base pay, then add either equipment or media, then start to show full compensation in 2010.
http://www.georgiadogs.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/122600aaa.html
The commentariat’s ability to jump to false conclusions never disappoints.
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Explain to me how that changes the underlying premise to my post.
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??? Correcting numbers is just correcting numbers. The false conclusions comment is in response to a a few of the comments above where people have had faulty rationalizations of their emotion reactions.
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Ah. Thought you were pointing a finger in my direction. Carry on.
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commentariat very specifically refers to commenters collectively as a whole.
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Sen . Good stuff the best thing about the entire thing is just how shitty UGA admin ( money men , Board , boosters , etc ) has been over all these years . I wish they had supported CMR from the jump but now that he is gone the mask has been removed on the total ineptitude of all running this entire thing we call UGA Football.
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