“There’s not much to be said for every few years dumping a coach who’s had a couple bad seasons. In the long run, you are about in the same situation down the road if you had done nothing and ridden out the storm.”

It’s official: Big-time sports are the most corrupt, most expensive, and most stupid division of the American university.

Margaret Soltan, 6:32AM
Posted in: sport

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2 Responses to ““There’s not much to be said for every few years dumping a coach who’s had a couple bad seasons. In the long run, you are about in the same situation down the road if you had done nothing and ridden out the storm.””

  1. Stephen Karlson Says:
    December 4th, 2012 at 11:03AM

    The coaching carrousel now includes contracts that read more like pre-nuptial agreements among the Crowned Heads of Europe. Your site has focused on the severance payments to coaches who get fired. These sometimes increase with years of service. There’s probably a labor economics paper to be written on the efficient structure of these buyouts, which have a separate section called “Termination by the Employer” dealing with them.

    Less well-known is the adjacent section, “Termination by the Employee”, that specifies the exit tax to be paid by a coach leaving for another opportunity. Both Dave Doeren, who just left for North Carolina State, and Jerry Kill, who is at Minnesota, paid this exit tax to Northern Illinois. I’m not sure where those funds went: clearly not to the Quidditch team or to buy dry-erase markers for Economics classrooms.

  2. Mr Punch Says:
    December 5th, 2012 at 10:49AM

    Once you get into the pattern of firing coaches every few years, of course, you have to put in these buyout deals because you’re not offering any job security. So you’re not exactly “in the same situation” – you’re in an increasingly expensive situation with the same results.

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