Big schools' allure fading

[Pony^]

Big schools' allure fading
College have-nots have appeal

By Kirk Bohls
AMERICAN-STATESMAN CORRESPONDENT
Monday, December 10, 2007

By the time you read this, Michigan may finally have a head football coach. Then again, the Wolverines may just be hoping to hire one before the 2008 season opener against Utah.

After Michigan's fiasco with Les Miles, Greg Schiano was the latest to dance with the Wolverines before deciding to sit this one out. Schiano decided he had a better gig at — gulp — Rutgers.

LSU coach Les Miles turned down alma mater Michigan.

Arkansas, last we checked, was working hard to convince — what's the count now — candidate No. 4 or 5 to take Houston Nutt's old job. Tommy Bowden couldn't be convinced to leave Clemson for Fayetteville, Butch Davis is staying at North Carolina, and Jim Grobe was the hot name until he decided Wake Forest was a better place to work.

Couldn't ex-Hog Jerry Jones offer Jason Garrett to resurrect his Razorbacks?

Alabama went through the yellow pages a year ago before finally convincing Nick Saban to take its millions.

What in Bo Schembechler's and Frank Broyles' world is going on when blue-blood colleges such as Michigan and Arkansas can't get someone to take their jobs? What does that say about college football?

It says this: No sport is undergoing more drastic change than college football, whose power structure is so irretrievably shaken up that we barely recognize it.

Hawaii in a BCS bowl? Kansas in the Orange Bowl? Illinois headed to the Rose Bowl? What's next? Notre Dame becoming bowl-eligible some year?

All those upsets on the field, all those Appalachian State-style stunners and Stanford-over-USC shockers, are now translating to changes in the business of hiring coaches.

If Michigan and Arkansas can't get whom they want, what chance does SMU or Baylor have? Actually, a better chance.

The Bears did all right, landing outgoing, Mack Brown wannabe Art Briles to exhume the program. And proven head coaches — Gary Barnett and Glen Mason, even Dennis Franchione — were tripping over themselves to line up for the Mustangs vacancy.

Here's what else this means:

A solid coach can win anywhere, in part because there are so many good, undiscovered players who want immediate playing time. Grobe can take the Demon Deacons to a BCS bowl. Hawaii became the third non-BCS conference team to get to one of the money bowls, following Utah and Boise State. South Florida can climb to No. 2. Missouri can go from unranked in the preseason to the brink of the national championship game.

It also means colleges are having to fork over more and more to lure these coaches from former have-nots to their big-money, bigger-pressure schools. Some coaches may be thinking: Who needs the scrutiny of these Park Place and Boardwalk schools?

And head coaches aren't just getting bigger paychecks for new jobs. They're getting big pay hikes from their current schools for staying. Schiano said no to Miami a year ago and was rewarded with a four-year extension and a $1.7 million annual salary. Now he says adieu to Big Blue and may be in line to benefit from a $120 million stadium expansion in Piscataway, if the New Jersey guv relents.

A coach doesn't even have to land an interview. Just have his name linked to another job, and his athletic director can't offer a pay raise fast enough. Miami AD Paul Dee told me in September that before he hired Randy Shannon as his head coach, he ran into Steve Spurrier at the annual December dinner in New York and kidded, "Do you want to step into the hallway with me and get yourself a raise?"

Is this a great country or what? It is if you're one of the chosen few, the 120 Division I-A head coaches who average a staggering $1 million in salary.

That's skewed by the four who top $3 million a year — Oklahoma's Bob Stoops, Alabama's Saban, Florida's Urban Meyer and Iowa's Kirk Ferentz — but more than 50 make a mil a season, a USA Today analysis showed. That's up from nine just eight years ago, as salaries increased a whopping 9 percent in a year.

Still feel sorry for head coaches who get criticized in columns and on talk shows for poor third-down calls?

That doesn't help you at all if you're one of 10,000-plus Division I-A football players, who may get a little annoyed by their shrinking piece of the pie.

As a father paying for rising college tuition, room and board for three sons, a scholarship is no small prize. But talk of monthly college subsidies for football players could get back on the radar. No college junior should ever be criticized for leaving campus early.

At the very least, the NCAA should let all college athletes leave their school, transfer to another and play immediately if their head coach breaks his or her contract and takes another job. Seriously. After all, very few would want to transfer because — wink, wink — the vast majority choose their college because of education, right?

In addition, one of the most irksome details in these large contracts is the confounding need to include mind-numbing incentives.

Mike Sherman's new deal at Texas A&M, for instance, includes bonuses of $37,500 for reaching the Big 12 title game and the same amount for winning it. My bad, but I thought that's why the Aggies are giving Sherman $1.8 million a year.

This isn't to pick on the Aggies. The Longhorns have similar clauses for Mack Brown, who is paid $2.91 million a year to go to the Holiday Bowl.

Shelling out that much for Brown makes perfect business sense, given the school brings in more than $63 million from football. Heck, if DeLoss Dodds wished, he could easily defend paying Brown $10 million a year, because Texas could afford it.

He might, too. After all, whenever Brown retires, how could UT possibly ever tempt the Bowling Green coach to come to a place like Austin?

http://www.statesman.com/sports/content ... bohls.html