THE IRONY IS RICH
Amid troubled time for college sports, insanely expensive move fits right in
Tom Herman got what everyone figured he had coming, and that included a $15 million parting gift. Maybe this finally will be the time when Texas gets what it thinks it deserves, too.
The odds say Steve Sarkisian won’t make the Longhorns happy, because only a handful of the 30 head coaches who preceded him ever did. He probably isn’t the next Mack Brown or the next Darrell Royal, but it’s hard to blame UT for bailing on a guy who’d all but proven he wasn’t.
Herman spent four years winning zero allies and too few games, and in the end wealthy donors were eager to cover the exorbitant cost of getting rid of him. In the context of what college football has become, paying through the nose to land the top assistant coach in the country was a justifiable move, and it might even turn out to be a wise one.
But in the context of the real world, what college football has become is obscene.
And the Longhorns are just the latest example of it.
If before this season there were any doubts about the noxiousness of the sport’s out-ofw hack power structure and laughable pretense of amateurism, they should be gone now. A pandemic made it more clear than ever that players aren’t viewed as students but as the means to a billion-dollar revenue end, and the past few weeks of coaching changes have reminded everyone that big programs can scrounge up cash for coaches even when crying poverty.
In September, citing what athletic director Chris Del Conte called “extremely challenging times” amid economic fallout from COVID-19, UT announced 35 layoffs, 273 salary reductions and 11 furloughs for staffers in the department. If Sarkisian retains none of Herman’s assistants, the Longhorns will end up shelling out about $24 million for coaches to walk away.
And look, UT isn’t the only hypocritical institution when it comes to this. According to a running total kept by USA Today, public FBS schools have committed to at least $107 million in buyouts for football coaches this season. That includes $7.3 million to Kevin Sumlin at Arizona, where the Wildcats had laid off 21 employees, and $1.3 million to a strength coach at Iowa, where the Hawkeyes announced the elimination of four smaller sports programs.
Yes, it’s true that at most places, football pays for everything else. And it’s true that UT would not have fired Herman if it was not assured of getting huge — and, in many cases, tax-exempt — donations to cover the cost and build more extravagant facilities for unpaid players to enjoy.
But the whole enterprise never has looked more grotesque, and not only when one considers how much good a fraction of the money going to Alamo Bowl coaches could have done elsewhere.
Near the beginning of the pandemic, Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy declared the need for players to return to the field as soon as possible, “to run money through the state.” By summer, many coaches were swearing that players would be safer in the structure of a football routine than they would be at home, but that became a tougher sell with every locker-room outbreak.
Now, more than ever, it’s obvious college football is little more than a business, so perhaps that’s how UT’s coaching decision should be judged. The real mistake, of course, was awarding Herman a lucrative — and fully guaranteed — contract extension after a 2018 season in which he won the Sugar Bowl but lost four games. There was no need to keep him away from other suitors.
So firing him became much more expensive than it needed to be, and then the Longhorns created another quandary for themselves with a reported pursuit of Urban Meyer while this season was still going on. How effective was Herman going to be — either as a coach or as a recruiter, where he already was struggling — once he knew UT was talking to other candidates for his job?
The Longhorns had decided to move on, but because of the timing they chose to employ one more disingenuous college football tradition — the phony vote of confidence in a coach near signing day.
UT president Jay Hartzell acknowledged Saturday that the school engaged Sarkisian in talks “a couple of weeks ago,” right around the time recruits were locking themselves into binding letters of intent. The next fan to criticize a player for opting out of a bowl game should remember that.
As for Sarkisian’s credentials? He’s no sure thing, but few coaches are. He said encouraging things Saturday about what he’d learned at previous head coaching gigs at Washington and USC, and if he canmake any of Alabama’s success rub off on the Longhorns, they will have done well.
His hiring was, in short, justifiable.
Even if so little about his sport is anymore.