I already laid out a realistic cost for a 5-year outlay. I'm not recapping it. When the school is ready to make a real, comprehensive investment, maybe a worthwhile coach will consider wanting the job.
That's what you're missing. You're getting ahead of yourself that this is a desirable job for someone who can win. Today. it isn't. It could be with the right investment, which I have no evidence is on the horizon.
What you laid out doesn’t even make sense. You’re accounting the head coach’s salary as a multi year “investment” and counting that towards a massive number that’s not even relevant
1) We’re already paying top dollar relatively speaking for Pastner. If we keep Pastner here for 5 more years we’re going to be paying him the same $15M we would be paying any other coach. So that $15M is irrelevant when you’re talking about raising funds, it’s going to come out regardless.
2) Theres already been funds raised and allocated towards facilities upgrades, so those “budgeted” numbers you came up with need to come way down.
3) We do not need anywhere close to $1.5M to hire competent assistants. If we hired 3 assistants at $500k each we’d have 3 of the highest paid assistants in the country. Mike White at UGA hired his first 2 assistants for a
combined salary of $620k, or ~$310k each. If we hired 3 assistants at a rate of $500k, $300k, and $200k we could have an extremely well-rounded and highly impactful coaching staff for $1M.
4) There are plenty of jobs that aren’t “desirable” that end up producing very successful programs because they make the right hire. Was Auburn desirable at all before they hired Bruce Pearl? Hell no. Was Rutgers desirable at all before they hired Pikiell? Nope. Oh, and guess what, we’re paying Pastner
more than what Rutgers is paying Pikiell for this season. Was there anything attractive about TCU before Jamie Dixon got there? A good coaching hire can completely change the perception and “desirability” of a job. If we offer somebody $3-3.5M we could absolutely find a top-tier head coach.
5) You estimated we need $9M for NIL/recruiting purposes? According to this site we could sign literally all 10 of the top 10 highest valued NIL players in college basketball, and still have some left over.
Here’s a look at the top 10 men's players with the highest On3 NIL Valuation heading into the 2022-2023 basketball season.
www.on3.com
Realistically we probably need to have about $2M dedicated for NIL to be able to pull in one of the most talented classes in the ACC.
Your valuation for the next 5ish years is a $37M “investment” of which most of the money is already set aside, and most of the rest is an extreme over-estimate. If we pay a HC $3M and assistants a total of $1M, that’s ~$20M for 5 years, and only about $3-5M of that would need to be “new” money. Facilities upgrades are already factored in, but if you want to get crazy you could add $2M more in “new” money. Recruiting staff and NIL money we’d need about $6M total in “new” money to obtain a top 1/3 level in the conference. So on the lower end we’d need about $1M additional cash per year over the next 5 years to make any improvement at all, and on the very high end we’d need about $2M per year to make a
significant jump. That’s somewhere between $5-10M in new money over the next 5 years to take us from a cellar dweller to a legit contender. That’s not unobtainable.