UConn, Ollie learn meaning of a contract

For a school fresh off a flurry of headlines about its yawning athletics department deficit, this was news it didn’t need. The University of Connecticut, an arbitrator ruled, will have to pay its former basketball coach $11 million within 10 business days, all because it failed to adequately prove its case for firing him.

The story of Kevin Ollie at UConn was full of twists. A four-year player in the 1990s, Ollie went on to a long career in the NBA largely through the strength of his character. He was never the best player on a team, and yet he found a way to stick around. He returned to his alma mater as an assistant under longtime men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun at the tail end of his tenure.

Then Calhoun suddenly retired and Ollie was thrust into the head coaching job, where he was an immediate success, winning a national championship in only his second year, in 2014. But it didn’t take long for things to go sour, and Ollie’s last few years in Storrs were some of the worst UConn basketball teams in decades. It was sad to see, but there was little question a change needed to be made.

Here’s where the disagreement started. UConn fired Ollie in the middle of a multiyear contract, but it tried to argue that it didn’t need to pay him the millions of dollars still owed to him because of NCAA violations accrued under Ollie’s watch. For a program that has faced the wrath of the NCAA in the past, this was maybe a reasonable stance — if any school needed to err on the side of following the rules, it was UConn.

Ollie and his attorneys argued that the violations didn’t amount to much, and that UConn simply didn’t like the job he was doing, and therefore owed him the rest of the money in his contract. After a protracted legal dispute, an arbitrator ultimately agreed with Ollie, and the university needs to pay even more than it would have originally.

There are a few lessons here. One, which the arbitrator pointed out, is that minor violations of

NCAA rules are commonplace and usually not that big a deal. Even Geno Auriemma’s women’s basketball team has been found to have bent some rules, and the consequences amount to a stern talking-to. This is how the industry works.

The other lesson is that a contract needs to mean something. Maybe UConn made a mistake in signing Ollie to a long-term deal, but that’s the price it had to pay. There was a time when Ollie looked like a hot commodity and UConn was smart to lock him in place. That ended up not being the case, but you don’t get a doover. It’s not like anyone who had been promised millions of dollars would be expected to just walk away from all that money.

UConn wanted a new coach but didn’t want to pay what it had promised. It was rightfully told that wasn’t how it works. The best path for all parties is to move on, be more careful with future contracts and let the past be.

UConn wanted a new coach but didn’t want to pay what it had promised. It was rightfully told that wasn’t how it works.