Coaching Carousel 4 - Hard work pays off in the future, laziness pays off now
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mstranahan
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I just don't think Wake will let Manning go and eat an $18MM buyout
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Tomorrow and Tuesday are the big firing days because the conferences don't want them announced during the conference tournaments and the NCAA wants them out of the way before the big dance starts.
Manning is going to be an interesting decision. Hard to believe they hired a new AD to keep the same HC.
Smart at Texas is going to have a very hot seat next year. Sounds like TX isn't ready to eat the buyout yet.
Manning is going to be an interesting decision. Hard to believe they hired a new AD to keep the same HC.
Smart at Texas is going to have a very hot seat next year. Sounds like TX isn't ready to eat the buyout yet.
A Wake fan told me on Twitter Manning would be gone by tomorrow. I think he gets another year.
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Way back in the day, I took Econ and accounting and other finance related courses. I’ve worked in business for a long time. I think I understand supply and demand.
I understand fully guaranteed contacts or large buyouts for the top 20 coaches. Maybe even the top 30. I don’t understand why coaches who haven’t made the NCAA tournament have more than a marginal buyout, much less a fully guaranteed contract.
The main idea behind those contract terms is that the school will lose the coach and not be able to replace them with the same caliber of coach. Aside from the top coaches, that doesn’t seem to be the case. For Georgia Tech, the buyouts have prevented us from hiring the top level coaches, and there isn’t a ton of evidence that we’d have suffered for not having large buyouts.
I’ve heard it said that if you never miss a flight, you’re arriving at the airport too early. I’d say if you’re not losing an occasional coach, your buyouts are too high.
The other rationale is that you need the buyouts for recruiting. The buyouts don’t seem to have given us a recruiting edge. There seem to be other, bigger factors that would be better places to spend our money.
Sports agents must be amazing sales people. In most marketplaces, when someone says “everyone else is doing X”, there’s a group of people who say “that’s nice. I’m not”. I don’t see that with coaching contracts.
The Manning contract is even worse than the Gregory extension. Much worse. Wow.
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I understand fully guaranteed contacts or large buyouts for the top 20 coaches. Maybe even the top 30. I don’t understand why coaches who haven’t made the NCAA tournament have more than a marginal buyout, much less a fully guaranteed contract.
The main idea behind those contract terms is that the school will lose the coach and not be able to replace them with the same caliber of coach. Aside from the top coaches, that doesn’t seem to be the case. For Georgia Tech, the buyouts have prevented us from hiring the top level coaches, and there isn’t a ton of evidence that we’d have suffered for not having large buyouts.
I’ve heard it said that if you never miss a flight, you’re arriving at the airport too early. I’d say if you’re not losing an occasional coach, your buyouts are too high.
The other rationale is that you need the buyouts for recruiting. The buyouts don’t seem to have given us a recruiting edge. There seem to be other, bigger factors that would be better places to spend our money.
Sports agents must be amazing sales people. In most marketplaces, when someone says “everyone else is doing X”, there’s a group of people who say “that’s nice. I’m not”. I don’t see that with coaching contracts.
The Manning contract is even worse than the Gregory extension. Much worse. Wow.
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BeeRBee
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To me, your post seems to conflate two types of buyouts, which are separate but perhaps related.
The first (“The main idea behind these contract terms...”) seems to refer to buyouts where the coach has to pay the school if he leaves before the end of the contract. I tend to agree that the fear of not being able to replace a coach is overblown. On the other hand, replacing a coach is dispruptive to a program, and I can see a school thinking that if they are committing to a coach they would like some demonstration of financial commitment on the other side. I think of a school like Temple in football, who appears to be doing a great job of identifying coaching talent, and as a result is replacing their coach every two years. Even if you’re getting good coaches, it’s hard to build a sustainable program that way.
The second type of buyout is the one that has hamstrung GT, where the school makes a commitment to the coach. I guess my answer to why this exists is that enough schools are willing to offer it that any school attempting to buck the trend would face a greatly diminished pool of candidates for any coaching hire. That’s basic supply and demand. It’s pretty clear why a coach would want such a buyout clause - it’s a volatile profession, the AD or President could change at any time, you want the school to stick by you while you implement your system/recruiting/etc., you don’t want to have to uproot your family because you had one bad year etc. Schools can’t get together and agree not to offer buyouts, because that would be illegal collusion. It would be interesting to see the history of contract terms and how they evolved. IIRC, Pepper Rogers sued GT over whether or not his indirect compensation (radio show etc.) had to be paid to him when he was fired, which I’m sure led to more specific guarantees in contracts.
You could certainly argue that schools are bad negotiators, and tend to think that a given coach is more important than he really is, but at this point the genie’s out of the bottle and I don’t think any one school could shift the tide. Schools want to make a splash, win the press conference, giving attractive coaching candidates leverage in negotiating contracts. I do think that non-profit athletic organizations driven by fan/booster reactions and attached to educational institutions are perhaps not best positioned for rational economic decisions.
Also, there’s too much money in the system and compensation to the athletes is capped.
YlJacket
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Buyouts have a bad name for sure, but recognize that generally buyouts are normally a "good thing" - a method for a school to pay less than the full value of the contract they used to entice a coach to sign. The difference between a fully guaranteed NBA player contract and a not guaranteed NFL contract (roughly). I expect Wake wishes to hadies they had a buyout for Manning, just like we wish we had a buyout for Hewitt. Like the NFL, schools use buyouts to be able to control their top end expense with a longer term contract specifying a salary while limiting their downside with a buyout clause. They also get to have some stability by having the coach have to pay a buyout before they can go accept another gig. Temple made bank on that clause this offseason - even though they lost 2 good coaches.
Coaches are not going month to month or on yearly contracts. Neither side wants that. The rest is negotiating a balance that reflects the leverage and financial resources on both sides.
Coaches are not going month to month or on yearly contracts. Neither side wants that. The rest is negotiating a balance that reflects the leverage and financial resources on both sides.
BeeRBee
Jolly Good Fellow
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Good points. In theory, negotiating the economic value of a coach over a given time period is separate from negotiating the structure of the payments over that period. The NFL, with relatively few guaranteed contracts, has gravitated to a system of large up front signing bonuses, as a way of guaranteeing payments. Guarantees allow the payments to be spread more evenly over the contract term.
tsrich
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How does Haith keep failing into jobs?
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He's the new king of staying ahead of the reaper.
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I am blending the "coach has to pay" with the "school has to pay" buyouts, and I shouldn't have lumped them in the way I did. But, I think they're related in the sense that, if the school wants a buyout for a coach leaving before the contract is out, the coach has negotiating leverage for at least reciprocity. I think the schools should be in the stronger bargaining position than the coaches, but if I were the AA, I would be willing to drop buyout amounts on both sides. The value to the school seems to be small.
I realize that Temple loses a lot of football coaches, but they have fairly standard buyouts and the buyouts didn't help much.
I do believe the schools are bad negotiators. If we had the equivalent of a salary cap for coaches, we'd be allocating it more like the Raiders than the Patriots. I think we underspend on assistant coaches and other support areas.
Our negotiating weakness is that the Georgia States and the Mercers of the world might have an easier path the the NCAA than we do. They won't make much noise there, but they're climbing over a shorter hill to get there.
Moneyball comes up a lot on this site. One MLB team did make dramatic waves in baseball, but they also charted their own course. They didn't have to collude--they just needed a value model to follow. We aren't doing that--we're just doing what everyone else is doing. Finding a big pile of money would help us out, but I haven't seen us doing anything different that would work without that pile of money.
Is there a WAR for basketball coaches? That'd be interesting to look at.
Regarding head coaching quality vs supply and demand, the coaches we missed out on when replacing Hewitt and Gregory are mostly in the same place we are. Shaka Smart was successful, but have any of the others done anything?
It's insane that Moton hasn't gotten a better job by now, especially with all these jobs having opened in NC lately. Needs a new agent, maybe? Can't be waiting for some dream job to open, can he? I predict he jumps somewhere this cycle.