Coaching Carousel Summary

I started wondering how the latest turns of the coaching carousel had effected salaries. While State is not shopping for a new coach this year (Thank God!), these new salaries will eventually impact State. How soon the impact hits will depend on average coaching salaries and the level of success State sees on the field/court.

For example, SIU raised Chris Lowery’s salary from $255k to $750k. In Wisconsion, they are wondering how much Bo Ryan’s success and the going rate for successful coaches is going to cost them. Here is their rundown on the top Big 10 coaching salaries:

– Tubby Smith: $1.75M at Minn
– John Beilen: $1.3M at Michigan
– Todd Lickliter: $1.2M at Iowa
– Thad Matta $1.75M at OSU
– Tom Izzo: $1.736M at Mich State
– Kelvin Sampson: $1.5M at Indiana

IIUC, these are the guaranteed figures and you can be sure most include incentives beyond this.

I was going to try and create some type of list of coaching moves and their new salaries from the various on-line article, but found a pretty neat little table from Louisville with the various moves through last Sunday. (Isn’t it nice when you find out that someone else has already invented the wheel that you were going to construct from scratch?)

Here are a few more new salaries that I found:

– Jeff Bzdelik, Colorada: $750k
– Stan Heath, South Florida, up to $4.275M over five years
– Jim Boylen, Utah: $575k
– Bob Huggins; WVU $800K (first year); $5M over five years

It would be about as silly to complain about salaries going up in a multi-billion dollar industry as it would to complain about the sun rising in the east. No, my point was simply to document what coaches around the country are getting….and remind everyone of how coaches are paid in general and specifically at NC State.

Everyone knows that a coaching contract is really only valid for two things: next year’s salary and the buyout terms. I hope that State is not in the market for a new revenue coach anytime soon….but it’s always good to keep an eye on the market value of something that you will need eventually.

About VaWolf82

Engineer living in Central Va. and senior curmudgeon amongst SFN authors One wife, two kids, one dog, four vehicles on insurance, and four phones on cell plan...looking forward to empty nest status. Graduated 1982

06-07 Basketball General NCS Basketball

61 Responses to Coaching Carousel Summary

  1. tcthdi-tgsf-twhwtnc 04/10/2007 at 10:55 AM #

    “My point: Don’t give out hefty raises so easily. What if the coach is a bust?”

    There is a mix that has to be found. You don’t want to overspend but if your coach gets taken away by another school (or in NC State’s case the NBA) you will end up spending a lot more for a possible unknown.

    I like to think that most coaches are not in it for money. Though a coach’s desire to earning fair market value should be expected there are many other factors that those guys have to look at. It can’t be who will pay me the most. For example, the ability to play Augusta may weigh in some football coaches mind in addition to cash.

  2. choppack1 04/10/2007 at 10:57 AM #

    Noah – I’ve always thought that the main difference between V and Coach K and Dean Smith was that V – at least initially – wasn’t satisfied just being a basketball coach. He was a very talented guy who liked the spot light and liked being on the stage. There was a period of time when he was our AD and basketball coach. There was also a period of time when he was our head coach and he had a talk show. These aren’t the actions of a man who is happy just being around the game…at the time he wanted more. I do believe that he either came to terms or decided, that he was the basketball coach at NC State – and he was happy doing that and he wanted to win another championship.

    He could have definitely made it work. Sadly, he was never given the chance nor the guidance.

  3. crackdog 04/10/2007 at 11:42 AM #

    “Ed Martin was the guy running practice”

    Do you mean Ray Martin? He used to be a neighbor of mine. I understand that he was recruiting Alan Houston. Houston ended up at Tennessee playing for his dad after V was fired. Ray ended up there too, for a time.

  4. RickJ 04/10/2007 at 12:18 PM #

    Not to speak for Noah but he probably meant Ed McLean. He would be a much likely candidate to be running practice.

  5. noah 04/10/2007 at 12:49 PM #

    Kenny Anderson won the hearts of ABC fans everywhere when he said he didn’t want to be another horse in Dean’s stable.

    And I did mean Ed McLean. Sorry. Alan Houston was initially going to Louisville…then his dad got the Tennessee job. Bad move for everyone.

    As far as V’s renaissance-man abilities…I think his intelligence was well-rounded enough that he would have been bored JUST being a head coach. He would have been good at a lot of different things…he just had a knack for gamesmanship and that led him into coaching.

  6. choppack1 04/10/2007 at 12:52 PM #

    Noah – I think he’s like a lot of us. He was easily distracted from his main duties and felt enjoyment and was good at a wide variety of things.

  7. RedTerror29 04/10/2007 at 12:57 PM #

    Many absolutely brilliant writers will turn out crap without a good editor. I feel about the same way with V – better leadership from above (he should have never been made AD) would have, IMO, resulting in us avoiding all of those problems, or at least reacting to them better.

  8. noah 04/10/2007 at 1:16 PM #

    I think he probably could have been a great AD…he just needed to give up being a coach. Being AD would have allowed him to dabble in a lot of things.

    If you cloned Valvano five times and set them on five different career paths, you would end up with five very successful people who did five very different things.

  9. BoKnowsNCS71 04/10/2007 at 1:51 PM #

    …..”always thought that the main difference between V and Coach K and Dean Smith was that V …..wasn’t satisfied just being a basketball coach.”

    In retrospect, I wonder if he was so different then than the American Express Card salesguy who lives in Durham and the Coca-Cola salesguy who lives in CH?

    Looks like Coach V set the standard years ahead of everyone else.

  10. choppack1 04/10/2007 at 1:53 PM #

    BoKnows – There’s a huge difference between doing an ad and being AD and having a nightly talk show. Both Coach K and Roy have their ads, but V had a show.

  11. BoKnowsNCS71 04/10/2007 at 1:56 PM #

    Roy and K have TV shows in season. K has a ongoing spot on 620 — when not out coaching the NBA stars in the off season.

  12. Jeremy Hyatt 04/10/2007 at 2:12 PM #

    Jim V’s just had an exceptional outlook and life philosophy, which you could see manifested in his every breath and action, which is rare. Analogically similar to a teacher that truly understands his subject matter but also is exceptionally capable of communicating it, and have his students at all levels learn. But i digress..

  13. choppack1 04/10/2007 at 2:21 PM #

    BoKnows – Daily TV shows?

  14. choppack1 04/10/2007 at 2:22 PM #

    Bo – I’m not talking about the coaching shows…I’m talking about a variety show.

  15. noah 04/10/2007 at 2:38 PM #

    Part of my NC State rehab project of 1990 was to pull V aside and ask him, “Do you want to be JTV? Or do you want to be Jim Valvano, head coach at NC State? Because you can be either one….but you can’t be both.”

    It wasn’t the TV Show…it was the TV Show, plus the motivational speaking, plus the recruiting, and the golf tourneys, and the coaching gigs, and the car commercials and the Cosby show appearances and everything else.

    If you’re head coach at NC State, I would bet that it’s about a sixty to seventy hour a week job during the season. That doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

  16. BillyTheKid 04/10/2007 at 2:49 PM #

    Thank you noah, you are saying so many things that I have believed for a very, very long time.

  17. BoKnowsNCS71 04/10/2007 at 2:51 PM #

    Question — does anyone think that Coach K is also following a similar path by coaching the US teams in the off season, running his clinics, recruiting, motivational speaking gigs (maybe?), writing books, doing some TV ads and magazine ads, plus all the other things he does?

  18. choppack1 04/10/2007 at 3:14 PM #

    Bo – That’s possible. I think the recent results at Duke could lead one to believe that. I’m sure he believes that he has a “process” in place…but I think that the process broke this year…

  19. Jimmy V 04/10/2007 at 3:36 PM #

    Noah, interesting analysis in the longer post above. Enjoyed reading it. I think it’s important to discuss a man’s shortcomings. Not to crucify him, but just to have an honest discussion about the problems which existed and the things/areas that could have been done better.

    My questions are: Why did the academics slide so badly during Jim Valvano’s time? This question is not to villify or bash JV. I know he brought in a few questionable players. But what about the academic services for athletes. Why didn’t JV monitor that stuff more closely? I realize that, during the last five years of his time at State, he became heavily involved in a lot of things. Winning the national title opened some doors for him because of the fame. Why didn’t all the problems with graduation rates and players having academic difficulties come to attention back in the ’80s? It all came to a head in ’89-’90.

    Interested in a little bit of honest discussion here.

  20. tcthdi-tgsf-twhwtnc 04/10/2007 at 4:23 PM #

    Anyone know where Ed McLean went after leaving State? He was the head coach at Broughton in Raleigh prior to his move to State.

  21. noah 04/10/2007 at 4:31 PM #

    It’s unfair to put the academic stuff JUST on Vs shoulders. It belongs on the shoulders of everyone (Hi Bruce!).

    Valvano brought in some good students and some crappy students. He brought in (let’s be honest) some idiots. But for the most part, he did what most schools do…he brought in average students. And then we didn’t have any mechanism in place to make sure that those kids had the tutors and the structure to make sure that they were making adequate academic progress.

    Valvano justified it by claiming that these were grown men who needed to act like adults. Personally, I was a lot more comfortable with Sendek who mandated that his students sit in the front rows of class and who would suspend you for missing a study session (we’ll skip the coaching stuff for now, but I think we all admire Sendek for THIS part of the program).

    Why did it come to a head in 1989? Well, Prop 48 started in 1986. And it was make 700 OR get a 2.0 GPA in core classes and you can qualify. And we did get some negative attention. Somehow, Shackleford failed to qualify,…but didn’t have to sit out the whole year. And our graduation rates and attrition rates did get some local pub in the N&O.

    But by 1989, people were taking longer, harder looks at college athletics and they saw a pretty broken system. And our system had plenty of cracks in it. We weren’t the only ones…but we were the low-hanging fruit. We had a coach that everyone knew, we had pissed-off former players, we had an easy villain in Chris Washburn and we had a hack writer looking to do a book. Oh, and we had a local paper that thought they had a Pulitzer in their hands.

    Surround your program with a bunch of sh*t and you’ll draw flies…

  22. tcthdi-tgsf-twhwtnc 04/10/2007 at 4:32 PM #

    “My questions are: Why did the academics slide so badly during Jim Valvano’s time?”

    I may be wrong but it has always been my impression that college athletes academic expectations changed in general and NC State in particular during the 80’s and Valvano didn’t see the wave. Why he didn’t is probably due to is outside activities but that is pure speculation. I’m pretty sure Bob Valvano speaks of this in his book about JV.

  23. StateFans 04/10/2007 at 5:06 PM #

    This is great stuff. Never seen this discussed in such meaningful detail and with objectivity. Keep it going!

  24. noah 04/10/2007 at 6:12 PM #

    One of the big failings of the administration of the 1980s was to never sit down and sketch out EXACTLY what we wanted from our student athletes.

    We never said, “You can have this many academic exceptions. You can’t bring in people BELOW this line here and you need to graduate at least this many people.”

    V probably could have told them what tools he needed to achieve that. I think one of the more visionary things we saw during the 1990s was Les Robinson using the shoe money to fund a scholarship program for former players. That was brilliant. And then Lin Dawson formed the IMPACK program, which was a big help.

    I heard a pilot tell a story once about how trainee pilots flying in a cloud bank will often keep making little tiny incremental changes to their headings, always ignoring the artificial horizon. They keep doing it to the point where they come out the cloud bank on the other side and they’re flying upside down.

    Well, we kept flying steady, doing what we’d always done…and college sports kept making the changes. And we ended up upside down.

  25. Jimmy V 04/10/2007 at 6:14 PM #

    Noah, I seem to recall now that Jim Valvano’s stance was: “These are grown men.” I loved/still love Jim Valvano to death. All-time favorite coach. But I think that was not a good approach to young men in college. I don’t say that, belittling JV. I just think his approach was a little naive. You’ve got to monitor young 18 years old in college. A lot of them mentally aren’t very mature. There are many pressures and influences. There are a lot of different things to do with your time besides studying for your classes: parties, basketball, drinking, females, lifting weights, doing drugs, the bar and club scene. I graduated from NCSU in ’94 and I had around a 3.0 GPA. It could have been higher, but I didn’t want to spend every waking moment in the books. I just think young 18-22 years old need monitoring and if you, as a college basketball coach, don’t do that, you’re asking for trouble.

    I think the culture was changing about 15-20 years ago. Everything you described, Noah, contributed to V’s ouster. You’re right. I don’t remember anything in place to help NCSU’s basketball players back in the ’80s with their academic progress. That’s a shame. Don’t know why that slipped through the cracks.

    I loved Jim Valvano’s coaching ability, his ability to gameplan the other team, his humor, his jokes, his color, his passion, and his love for NCSU. But I have to say he had some flaws (We all do, including myself.). He just didn’t have the right philosophy and approach to academics with his players. I’m not saying if he had been given another chance in ’90, he wouldn’t have changed. The NCAA infractions were very minor. The graduation rate was more troubling. I don’t expect it to be 90%, but it should be around 70% at least. Sometimes, people aren’t going to graduate. Under Jim Valvano, it was low. What was it honestly under Les? What was it honestly under Herb? Any of our gifted posters who can come up with those numbers . . . That would be interesting to know.

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