University of Oregon athletics doesn’t like to do contracts.
As all criminal syndicates know, if you write down what you’re doing, other people can figure out… what you’re doing.
Do you remember any scenes of Al Pacino signing contracts in The Godfather?
So when the school’s athletic director left the other day to take a tv job, and the school just, you know, gave him $2.3 million dollars even though he wasn’t fired – he quit – and even though it was all done via secret handshakes, the state Justice Department decided to investigate.
The UO says it had no signed agreement with Bellotti on the terms of his employment or departure when he took over the job of athletic director last summer, yet the university said it will pay the former football coach the $2.3 million to fulfill unspecified “commitments” that were never put on paper.
Bellotti negotiated the terms of his employment orally with UO President Richard Lariviere in July, when both of them were beginning their new jobs, a UO spokeswoman said last week. The UO is not making those terms public. Less than nine months later, the two settled on the details of a deal allowing Bellotti to leave for the television job with the multimillion-dollar payout.
Nobody at the university has any comment to make to reporters.
Reporters want to know how a once-respectable university became such a cheesy outfit.
March 30th, 2010 at 7:13AM
Time to shake down the students again, I suppose.
March 30th, 2010 at 1:48PM
The word on the street is that UO has offered the University of Minnesota’s Tubby Smith a coaching job. Don’t know about a contract.
Tubby can take the measly 10% raise or he can use it to shake down Minnesota for a $36 million practice facility.
Given UD’s portrayal of athletics at OU, perhaps he’ll decide to stay put, but actually I hope not if it ends up costing us $36 mil.
March 31st, 2010 at 6:17PM
Come to think of it, don’t they set fire to the contracts and hold the flaming pieces in their hands until they burn to ashes? That is probably why there is no paper trail. It’s an ash trail.