Andy Staples of The Athletic had a very enlightening column today on the firing of Will Muschamp at South Carolina. There are three takeaways from that makes me think of Tech:
1. Muschamp got a big raise and extension after beating Michigan in the Outback Bowl in 2015. He was still basically a .500 coach, had built a 9-4 record on the backs of mostly teams that had losing records. Because of that extension, when no other team was in play, his buyout this season is $15 million. (I can't help but think of Kirby and Kliff after the 2013 Holiday Bowl). Staples goes on to say he can't understand why ADs continue to give in to coaches agents on extensions.
2. How this may impact Tech in the future? Staples says despite the pandemic, you may still see movement in coaching firings/hirings for two reasons. While there is a theory that it's financially hard to fire a coach because of the buyout during a pandemic budget crunch, can you afford to keep him? Though it's still uncertain what season ticket sales will look like in 2021 because of the pandemic, sales could be greatly affected by disgruntled fans who will not renew because of the head coach. And if season ticket sales are cut back because of the pandemic, that increases the importance of revenue from...
3. Donors. Money from donors becomes more important than ever if season ticket sales are limited or fans have checked out. And if donors have also checked out, can you afford to keep the head coach?
Here's the column:
Like any other column about coaching in 2020, this one will begin and end with Jim Harbaugh.
This isn’t because Michigan coach Harbaugh gets more clicks than other coaches, even though it is true that he does. Here at The Athletic, we’re not as concerned with you clicking as we are with you getting the quality you paid for enough times that you are satisfied and come back and renew your subscription year after year. But unlike the agents for most college coaches — not Harbaugh, but we’ll get to him — we don’t ask you to stay paid up five years in advance and tell you that if you don’t, it’ll hurt our ability to recruit new writers.
This is where Harbaugh comes in, though he’s mostly an innocent bystander here at the beginning. The date is Jan. 1, 2018. The town is Tampa, Fla. Michigan is playing South Carolina in the Outback Bowl. This is not the Outback Bowl where Jadeveon Clowney hit Vincent Smith so hard that his helmet popped off and then Clowney cradled the ball with one hand like a mama dragon cradling one of her eggs. This is the Outback Bowl that took place five years later, the one you probably half paid attention to while you waited to watch Oklahoma and Georgia tee it up in the Rose Bowl. In that Michigan-South Carolina Outback Bowl, the Wolverines lead 19-3 until South Carolina scores on a 17-yard Rico Dowdle run with 2:25 remaining in the third quarter.
This sparks a blistering stretch during which the Gamecocks outscore Michigan 20-0 in about six minutes. South Carolina adds a field goal late to cap a 26-19 win that runs the Gamecocks’ record to 9-4 for the 2017 season. The Gamecocks have won six of their final eight — losing only to College Football Playoff participants Georgia and Clemson. Of course, three of those six wins (Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida) are against teams that fired their coaches during the 2017 season.
But there’s no time to consider nitpicky details such as this. The momentum has swung, which means it’s time to spend some money. And here is where South Carolina athletic director Ray Tanner committed the original sin in L’Affaire Muschamp.
It was this decision that will force South Carolina, in the midst of a pandemic that has cost the athletic department millions and forced the department to furlough employees and/or cut their pay, to commit to paying Will Muschamp about $15 million between now and 2023. The decision Gamecocks brass made Sunday to dump Muschamp sends a clear signal that no financial shortfall and no extraordinary circumstances will keep college sports administrators from giving millions to coaches to not work. The coaching carousel is open for business, and if your guy is underachieving, any modicum of safety he felt probably disappeared Sunday afternoon when Muschamp got fired.
There will be plenty of complaints about South Carolina’s decision to spend so much money to jettison Muschamp, but I’m not sure even the shortfall caused by the pandemic — estimated to be as much as $54 million — would have stopped this from happening once Muschamp’s defenses started playing two-hand touch. Following a 30-22 win against Auburn on Oct. 17, the Gamecocks allowed 159 points in their next three games. (Remember, Muschamp’s original bailiwick is defense.) The final straw was a 59-42 loss Saturday at Ole Miss during which this happened:
Had Muschamp been retained through the end of this season and into 2021, it would have sapped any remaining enthusiasm Gamecocks fans had for their program. Last year, I explained two weeks before Willie Taggart’s firing at Florida State why mounting apathy might make it more expensive to keep Taggart than to fire him. The same applied to Muschamp, though the circumstances are different.
With Taggart, it was somewhat easy to do the math and figure out how much Florida State stood to lose if season ticket sales dropped to particular levels. And if South Carolina is allowed to sell all the seats at Williams-Brice Stadium next season, then it’s quite possible we could have used the same equation to explain Muschamp’s firing. But we don’t have any idea at this point what percentage of each stadium’s capacity athletic departments will be allowed to sell next season, so we have to use something more vague. And strangely enough, this second method probably makes an even stronger case for firing Muschamp now.
If an athletic department can’t sell all the seats in its stadium, then it becomes even more reliant on the kindness of individual donors. Donations that aren’t tied to season tickets are still tax deductible — a change to the tax code stripped the deduction for quid-pro-quo donations that were packaged with season ticket purchases — so an incentive remains for donors to give. But they also must be inspired to give, and if the department is promising more of something they hate, they’ll be disinclined to write checks.
South Carolina probably had less choice in this matter than you think. It was going to lose eight figures on this deal either way. I do not write this to absolve Tanner and the athletic department leadership as they fire their money cannon at a coach they no longer want. Tanner and anyone else who played a role in Muschamp’s contract extension after that Outback Bowl deserve all the blame here. They got suckered by one of the biggest cons in sports, and they aren’t even close to alone — which is why other schools may wind up paying multimillion-dollar buyouts in the midst of a pandemic.
Most athletic directors probably understand VORP, the baseball statistic that stands for Value Over Replacement Player. What this basically measures is the value of an asset in-hand compared to the generally agreed upon value of a similar asset the organization could easily pick up tomorrow. The problem is ADs often do not consider VORP — or, in this case, VORC — when coaches’ agents come to them and say their guy needs to have at least five years remaining on his deal or other schools will use it against them in recruiting. They also don’t consider it when a coach’s agent says, “Well, there are other jobs open.”
Let’s examine the deal Muschamp got. Notice that I didn’t call Muschamp’s hire the original sin, though that is a fairly commonly held opinion. Muschamp was an elite recruiter and an elite defensive coach during his three-plus seasons Florida; he struggled to choose good offensive philosophies and offensive coordinators. Coaches can learn from their mistakes. Just ask Ed Orgeron, who was horrible at Ole Miss but just won a national title at LSU.
So it stood to reason that if Muschamp could hire correctly on the offensive side of the ball that he could be a successful head coach. Muschamp was hired at South Carolina in December 2015 on a five-year deal that started at $3 million a year and included a $100,000 raise each subsequent year. If Muschamp had been on this deal when he got fired, South Carolina would owe him about $300,000. (Which, lest we get too carried away by the figures, is still a considerable sum.)
But Tanner and company got very excited about that furious close to Muschamp’s second season, a season which ran his record at South Carolina to 15-13 overall and 8-8 in the SEC. They also may have been scared that Muschamp might depart for — where?— Arkansas? Tennessee? There were quite a few jobs open during that hiring cycle, but Muschamp didn’t seem a fit for any of them. And even if he was, couldn’t Tanner just find someone else at that price point to go .500 in the SEC?
Apparently not. Muschamp, who already made $3.2 million a year, received a $1 million a year raise. He also was extended through 2023. The buyout remained 70 percent of the amount remaining on the contract. Had Tanner just given Muschamp the raise — and a $1 million annual raise is quite a prize for winning the Outback Bowl — South Carolina would have owed Muschamp about $370,500 after firing him Sunday. But those ’croots need to know the head coach is signed up past graduation, even though the best of them only want to spend three years in college and all of them are smart enough by now to know that the average head coaching tenure doesn’t last five years.
But that wasn’t all. After South Carolina went 7-6 in 2018, Muschamp got no raise but was extended another year to 2024. It wasn’t until after a 4-8 2019 season that Tanner tried to claw back some of the money he’d promised. As part of the arrangement that allowed Muschamp to hire Mike Bobo as South Carolina’s offensive coordinator this past offseason, Muschamp had to give up his annual rollover. But that still left South Carolina on the hook for a fortune.
Perhaps the financial squeeze of the pandemic will finally convince ADs that they don’t have to start drafting an extension anytime something remotely positive happens in the program. It’s OK for Oklahoma to lock down Lincoln Riley after he won the Big 12 and made the College Football Playoff in all three years he’s been the head coach. Those are good reasons for a raise and an extension. But going slightly over .500 in two years with no suitors on the horizon is not that.
The AD who likes his coach but knows the guy isn’t exactly Nick Saban or Dabo Swinney should just call the agent’s bluff. Tell him to go find the best offer for his guy, and tell the coach that if it’s such a great deal, he should take it. Then that AD can spend some of the buyout money he gets when that coach leaves on the next guy who probably will go slightly over .500 and get fired somewhere between year three and year five. But he probably won’t have to, because the coach probably will just stay.
Which brings us back to Harbaugh.
For all of the stories about how difficult Harbaugh is to work with, there is one thing he hasn’t done at Michigan. Well, two things. He hasn’t beaten Ohio State, and he hasn’t tried to make the Wolverines extend him for no reason. When Harbaugh left the San Francisco 49ers, he took a more-than-fair, seven-year deal at Michigan that made him one of the highest paid coaches in the sport.
He probably would be the first one to say he hasn’t lived up to the expectations implicit in that deal. He was paid that much to get Michigan back to the top of the Big Ten and to get Michigan into the Playoff. He has done neither. But that wouldn’t have stopped most coaches or their agents — Harbaugh doesn’t have one at the moment — from pestering their administrations for more money. Harbaugh notched double-digit wins in three of his first four seasons at Michigan. It’s a credit to him and to Michigan’s administration that a more absurd contract wasn’t drafted. If it had, that deal would look like the biggest albatross in sports right now.
Following Saturday’s 49-11 loss to Wisconsin, the Wolverines are 1-3. They appear to have no hope of competing with Ohio State; at this point it’s a legitimate question whether they’ll be able to beat Rutgers on Saturday. It appears the Harbaugh era has run its course, and Michigan leaders may need to make a decision soon about whether they want Harbaugh to keep coaching the Wolverines.
Harbaugh’s contract, the original one he signed when he came to Michigan, expires after next season. Michigan hasn’t historically fired coaches mid-season, so any decision likely would be made in very late 2020 or early 2021. The Wolverines would still owe at least $8 million, but imagine how much higher that number would be had Harbaugh done what every replacement level coach in America did and roped his AD into an extension that was neither necessary nor deserved.
And that’s how badly some ADs have bungled this. We’re praising the guy it’ll only cost $8 million to fire because he could have made it so much more expensive.
1. Muschamp got a big raise and extension after beating Michigan in the Outback Bowl in 2015. He was still basically a .500 coach, had built a 9-4 record on the backs of mostly teams that had losing records. Because of that extension, when no other team was in play, his buyout this season is $15 million. (I can't help but think of Kirby and Kliff after the 2013 Holiday Bowl). Staples goes on to say he can't understand why ADs continue to give in to coaches agents on extensions.
2. How this may impact Tech in the future? Staples says despite the pandemic, you may still see movement in coaching firings/hirings for two reasons. While there is a theory that it's financially hard to fire a coach because of the buyout during a pandemic budget crunch, can you afford to keep him? Though it's still uncertain what season ticket sales will look like in 2021 because of the pandemic, sales could be greatly affected by disgruntled fans who will not renew because of the head coach. And if season ticket sales are cut back because of the pandemic, that increases the importance of revenue from...
3. Donors. Money from donors becomes more important than ever if season ticket sales are limited or fans have checked out. And if donors have also checked out, can you afford to keep the head coach?
Here's the column:
Like any other column about coaching in 2020, this one will begin and end with Jim Harbaugh.
This isn’t because Michigan coach Harbaugh gets more clicks than other coaches, even though it is true that he does. Here at The Athletic, we’re not as concerned with you clicking as we are with you getting the quality you paid for enough times that you are satisfied and come back and renew your subscription year after year. But unlike the agents for most college coaches — not Harbaugh, but we’ll get to him — we don’t ask you to stay paid up five years in advance and tell you that if you don’t, it’ll hurt our ability to recruit new writers.
This is where Harbaugh comes in, though he’s mostly an innocent bystander here at the beginning. The date is Jan. 1, 2018. The town is Tampa, Fla. Michigan is playing South Carolina in the Outback Bowl. This is not the Outback Bowl where Jadeveon Clowney hit Vincent Smith so hard that his helmet popped off and then Clowney cradled the ball with one hand like a mama dragon cradling one of her eggs. This is the Outback Bowl that took place five years later, the one you probably half paid attention to while you waited to watch Oklahoma and Georgia tee it up in the Rose Bowl. In that Michigan-South Carolina Outback Bowl, the Wolverines lead 19-3 until South Carolina scores on a 17-yard Rico Dowdle run with 2:25 remaining in the third quarter.
This sparks a blistering stretch during which the Gamecocks outscore Michigan 20-0 in about six minutes. South Carolina adds a field goal late to cap a 26-19 win that runs the Gamecocks’ record to 9-4 for the 2017 season. The Gamecocks have won six of their final eight — losing only to College Football Playoff participants Georgia and Clemson. Of course, three of those six wins (Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida) are against teams that fired their coaches during the 2017 season.
But there’s no time to consider nitpicky details such as this. The momentum has swung, which means it’s time to spend some money. And here is where South Carolina athletic director Ray Tanner committed the original sin in L’Affaire Muschamp.
It was this decision that will force South Carolina, in the midst of a pandemic that has cost the athletic department millions and forced the department to furlough employees and/or cut their pay, to commit to paying Will Muschamp about $15 million between now and 2023. The decision Gamecocks brass made Sunday to dump Muschamp sends a clear signal that no financial shortfall and no extraordinary circumstances will keep college sports administrators from giving millions to coaches to not work. The coaching carousel is open for business, and if your guy is underachieving, any modicum of safety he felt probably disappeared Sunday afternoon when Muschamp got fired.
There will be plenty of complaints about South Carolina’s decision to spend so much money to jettison Muschamp, but I’m not sure even the shortfall caused by the pandemic — estimated to be as much as $54 million — would have stopped this from happening once Muschamp’s defenses started playing two-hand touch. Following a 30-22 win against Auburn on Oct. 17, the Gamecocks allowed 159 points in their next three games. (Remember, Muschamp’s original bailiwick is defense.) The final straw was a 59-42 loss Saturday at Ole Miss during which this happened:
Had Muschamp been retained through the end of this season and into 2021, it would have sapped any remaining enthusiasm Gamecocks fans had for their program. Last year, I explained two weeks before Willie Taggart’s firing at Florida State why mounting apathy might make it more expensive to keep Taggart than to fire him. The same applied to Muschamp, though the circumstances are different.
With Taggart, it was somewhat easy to do the math and figure out how much Florida State stood to lose if season ticket sales dropped to particular levels. And if South Carolina is allowed to sell all the seats at Williams-Brice Stadium next season, then it’s quite possible we could have used the same equation to explain Muschamp’s firing. But we don’t have any idea at this point what percentage of each stadium’s capacity athletic departments will be allowed to sell next season, so we have to use something more vague. And strangely enough, this second method probably makes an even stronger case for firing Muschamp now.
If an athletic department can’t sell all the seats in its stadium, then it becomes even more reliant on the kindness of individual donors. Donations that aren’t tied to season tickets are still tax deductible — a change to the tax code stripped the deduction for quid-pro-quo donations that were packaged with season ticket purchases — so an incentive remains for donors to give. But they also must be inspired to give, and if the department is promising more of something they hate, they’ll be disinclined to write checks.
South Carolina probably had less choice in this matter than you think. It was going to lose eight figures on this deal either way. I do not write this to absolve Tanner and the athletic department leadership as they fire their money cannon at a coach they no longer want. Tanner and anyone else who played a role in Muschamp’s contract extension after that Outback Bowl deserve all the blame here. They got suckered by one of the biggest cons in sports, and they aren’t even close to alone — which is why other schools may wind up paying multimillion-dollar buyouts in the midst of a pandemic.
Most athletic directors probably understand VORP, the baseball statistic that stands for Value Over Replacement Player. What this basically measures is the value of an asset in-hand compared to the generally agreed upon value of a similar asset the organization could easily pick up tomorrow. The problem is ADs often do not consider VORP — or, in this case, VORC — when coaches’ agents come to them and say their guy needs to have at least five years remaining on his deal or other schools will use it against them in recruiting. They also don’t consider it when a coach’s agent says, “Well, there are other jobs open.”
Let’s examine the deal Muschamp got. Notice that I didn’t call Muschamp’s hire the original sin, though that is a fairly commonly held opinion. Muschamp was an elite recruiter and an elite defensive coach during his three-plus seasons Florida; he struggled to choose good offensive philosophies and offensive coordinators. Coaches can learn from their mistakes. Just ask Ed Orgeron, who was horrible at Ole Miss but just won a national title at LSU.
So it stood to reason that if Muschamp could hire correctly on the offensive side of the ball that he could be a successful head coach. Muschamp was hired at South Carolina in December 2015 on a five-year deal that started at $3 million a year and included a $100,000 raise each subsequent year. If Muschamp had been on this deal when he got fired, South Carolina would owe him about $300,000. (Which, lest we get too carried away by the figures, is still a considerable sum.)
But Tanner and company got very excited about that furious close to Muschamp’s second season, a season which ran his record at South Carolina to 15-13 overall and 8-8 in the SEC. They also may have been scared that Muschamp might depart for — where?— Arkansas? Tennessee? There were quite a few jobs open during that hiring cycle, but Muschamp didn’t seem a fit for any of them. And even if he was, couldn’t Tanner just find someone else at that price point to go .500 in the SEC?
Apparently not. Muschamp, who already made $3.2 million a year, received a $1 million a year raise. He also was extended through 2023. The buyout remained 70 percent of the amount remaining on the contract. Had Tanner just given Muschamp the raise — and a $1 million annual raise is quite a prize for winning the Outback Bowl — South Carolina would have owed Muschamp about $370,500 after firing him Sunday. But those ’croots need to know the head coach is signed up past graduation, even though the best of them only want to spend three years in college and all of them are smart enough by now to know that the average head coaching tenure doesn’t last five years.
But that wasn’t all. After South Carolina went 7-6 in 2018, Muschamp got no raise but was extended another year to 2024. It wasn’t until after a 4-8 2019 season that Tanner tried to claw back some of the money he’d promised. As part of the arrangement that allowed Muschamp to hire Mike Bobo as South Carolina’s offensive coordinator this past offseason, Muschamp had to give up his annual rollover. But that still left South Carolina on the hook for a fortune.
Perhaps the financial squeeze of the pandemic will finally convince ADs that they don’t have to start drafting an extension anytime something remotely positive happens in the program. It’s OK for Oklahoma to lock down Lincoln Riley after he won the Big 12 and made the College Football Playoff in all three years he’s been the head coach. Those are good reasons for a raise and an extension. But going slightly over .500 in two years with no suitors on the horizon is not that.
The AD who likes his coach but knows the guy isn’t exactly Nick Saban or Dabo Swinney should just call the agent’s bluff. Tell him to go find the best offer for his guy, and tell the coach that if it’s such a great deal, he should take it. Then that AD can spend some of the buyout money he gets when that coach leaves on the next guy who probably will go slightly over .500 and get fired somewhere between year three and year five. But he probably won’t have to, because the coach probably will just stay.
Which brings us back to Harbaugh.
For all of the stories about how difficult Harbaugh is to work with, there is one thing he hasn’t done at Michigan. Well, two things. He hasn’t beaten Ohio State, and he hasn’t tried to make the Wolverines extend him for no reason. When Harbaugh left the San Francisco 49ers, he took a more-than-fair, seven-year deal at Michigan that made him one of the highest paid coaches in the sport.
He probably would be the first one to say he hasn’t lived up to the expectations implicit in that deal. He was paid that much to get Michigan back to the top of the Big Ten and to get Michigan into the Playoff. He has done neither. But that wouldn’t have stopped most coaches or their agents — Harbaugh doesn’t have one at the moment — from pestering their administrations for more money. Harbaugh notched double-digit wins in three of his first four seasons at Michigan. It’s a credit to him and to Michigan’s administration that a more absurd contract wasn’t drafted. If it had, that deal would look like the biggest albatross in sports right now.
Following Saturday’s 49-11 loss to Wisconsin, the Wolverines are 1-3. They appear to have no hope of competing with Ohio State; at this point it’s a legitimate question whether they’ll be able to beat Rutgers on Saturday. It appears the Harbaugh era has run its course, and Michigan leaders may need to make a decision soon about whether they want Harbaugh to keep coaching the Wolverines.
Harbaugh’s contract, the original one he signed when he came to Michigan, expires after next season. Michigan hasn’t historically fired coaches mid-season, so any decision likely would be made in very late 2020 or early 2021. The Wolverines would still owe at least $8 million, but imagine how much higher that number would be had Harbaugh done what every replacement level coach in America did and roped his AD into an extension that was neither necessary nor deserved.
And that’s how badly some ADs have bungled this. We’re praising the guy it’ll only cost $8 million to fire because he could have made it so much more expensive.
