DETROIT (AP) -John Calipari will make more in a single half at Kentucky than Kenya Crandell will make all year at Southern Utah.
That’s life for a college assistant. A lot of head coaches, too. Unless you’re Billy Donovan, Coach K, Roy Williams or a handful of others, coaching won’t make you a millionaire. Not in one season, anyway.
But if you’re looking for outrage at the $32 million Kentucky threw at Calipari this week, don’t look to the coaches convention at the Final Four. It’s just the price of business at Kentucky, most coaches said, a school that treasures its tradition-rich history and refuses to accept anything less in the future.
Besides, if Kentucky is willing to throw around that kind of money, maybe a little of it eventually will come their way, too.
“To me, it’s democracy. The market dictates,” Missouri coach Mike Anderson said Thursday. “Everyone’s trying to get a jump on the next guy. It’s always been like that. In everything. That’s just the American way, isn’t it?”
Anderson should know.
Eight for the first time since 2002, he had a new seven-year deal that bumped his salary by $500,000 a year.
Fed up after yet another season of not being in the hunt for a national title, Kentucky fired Billy Gillispie and lured Calipari from Memphis on Tuesday with an eight-year, $31.65 million deal. Calipari was 137-14 over the last four seasons, and his Memphis team was the only one in the country to be a No. 1 or 2 seed in the NCAA tournament during that same time frame. The Tigers made four straight regional semifinals, losing to Kansas in the final last year.
Athletic director Mitch Barnhart was quick to point out Calipari’s base salary is only $400,000 a year, with most of the rest coming from media and television rights. The athletic department is self-sufficient, Barnhart added, and no coach’s salary is paid with state appropriations or university funding.
The value Calipari brings to Kentucky extends far beyond the basketball court, too, Barnhart said. Coaches are often the faces of their schools, and their success can be as profitable for the anthropology department as it is for the athletic department. Long runs in the NCAA tournament have translated into increased applications; after Siena took top-seeded Louisville to the wire in the second round this year, coach Fran McCaffery said hits on the small, Catholic college’s Web site jumped from 8,000 to 60,000.
l program in America, you want the best coach, you must pay a premium price,” Barnhart said. “We don’t mind doing that, because we think it’s important. If done correctly, the investment in a coach will pay for itself and yield returns for the overall program in general.”
But the figure is still eye-popping, especially in the troubled economy.
Throw in $3 million in retention bonuses if he stays at Kentucky through March 31, 2016, Calipari will receive an average of $4 million a year over the eight years. Figure the Wildcats play 35 games a year – that’s assuming a trip to the Final Four each year, of course – Calipari will make about $114,286 per game. Add in 10 minutes worth of timeouts, and that’s $2,285 per minute – about the price of one of his designer suits.
“You have to ask some very hard questions, whether this is really in tune with the academic values, whether we’ve reached a point already that these high salary and packages for coaches has really extended beyond what’s expected within the academic community,” NCAA president Myles Brand said.
“Those questions really have to be asked. Now, we can’t answer them; it’s anti-trust if we were to try to regulate any salaries. But I would hope our university presidents and our conferences would ask those questions themselves.”
ally at Florida after winning back-to-back national titles, and Kansas coach Bill Self isn’t far behind at $3 million a year. Tom Crean is making about $2.36 million a year at Indiana – and he hasn’t even won a national title.
It’s the same story in college football, where the $4 million barrier has been broken. At least twice. Pete Carroll made $4.4 million in 2007, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Nick Saban, who has five fewer national titles than Bear Bryant, is getting $4 million from Alabama.
“In most situations, the coaches that receive those types of salaries are deemed by the institutions to have the ability at some point in time to bring in more than what they’re making,” said Dale Clayton, coach at Division II Carson-Newman. “If you look across the country, most of the coaches being paid those salaries are doing just that: The schools are actually getting their money’s worth. If you talk about Coach Saban at Alabama, that’s what’s happened with Alabama football. They had over 90,000 people come to a spring football game.
“The only tragedy that I see in that is the perception that it gives the general public, which is not a good perception,” Clayton added. “Because they do start to feel that that’s commonplace, when we up here know that it’s a long way from commonplace.”
ed up about Calipari’s big payday.
“It’s not a sign of the apocalypse. Not every school is going to go that way,” said Sperber, now a visiting professor in the University of California’s graduate school of education after more than 30 years at Indiana. “A lot of people interpret it as being symbolic of all college sports, and I see it as more symbolic of the schools that are obsessed with winning.”
If the top schools continue paying their coaches top money, though, it could lead to a rise in salaries across the board. No doubt the other top coaches and even those on the next tier down will be dropping Calipari’s name when they’re in contract negotiations.
There’s a downside to that, too. There’s already pressure to win yesterday, and an athletic director’s patience – or job security – isn’t likely to last long when he’s writing a huge check and not being paid back in a pile of wins.
“It’s really, in many ways, a double-edged sword,” McCaffery said. “When salaries get to a certain point, there’s going to be more pressure to win. And win quickly. The good news is we’re all going to be making more money. The bad news is job security, which was never great, is going to be a lot worse.”
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AP National Writer Eddie Pells contributed to this story.
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