The political ads media deluge is over! Television sets have been freed, now even those annoying commercial messages won’t seem as bad as what we’ve been subject to for the past month.
In the interim, the World Series is over, high school football and soccer playoffs are winding down, college basketball is underway, the annual Penn State loss to Ohio State has been sealed, and the winter sports seasons will soon commence.
With all the sports happenings, you might have missed the news coming out of Charlottesville, Virginia, a few weeks ago that longtime and highly respected University of Virginia men’s basketball coach Tony Bennett unexpectedly resigned following a highly successful 15-year run.
Most likely, no one reads the Webb Weekly in Charlottesville, Wahoo fans are few-and-far-between in this neck-of-the-woods, and college coaches stepping down is not earth-shattering news – so why am I taking this space to even bring it up?
Political strategist James Carville once offered the rationale, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The changing face of college athletics’ economic profile had an awful lot to do with Bennett’s decision to walk away from a job he loved despite the success he enjoyed.
During his time at Virginia, Bennett posted a 364-136 record, leading the program to two Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament titles, six ACC regular-season championships, and 10 NCAA Tournament appearances. He was named ACC Coach of the Year four times along the way.
He is the latest – and, at 55 years old, the youngest – high-profile coach to walk away, citing a measure of burnout with the modern realities of the profession, which include the transfer portal, NIL (name, image, likeness), and the recruiting jungle of paying players.
Describing himself as “a square peg in a round hole,” he concluded that he wasn’t suited to navigate the current landscape of college basketball.
“The game and college athletics is not in a healthy spot. There needs to be change. I think I was equipped to do the job here the old way. That’s who I am, and that’s how it was. I looked at myself and realized I’m no longer the best coach to lead this program. If you’re going to do it, you’ve got to be all in. And if you do it half-heartedly, it’s not fair to the university and those young men. That’s what made me step down.”
Bennett’s decision to leave college basketball coaching was a stunner but maybe just the tip of the iceberg that has already seen the melt-away of highly successful coaches like Alabama’s Nick Saban and Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh, who left the college campus in the past year.
College football analyst Joel Klatt recently published a revealing column regarding the college coaching exodus.
“With NIL now taking on such a prominent role in today’s college football landscape, more and more coaches are going to have to remove themselves from the football field side of things and dive head first into the business side of the sport. Personally, I don’t like this for coaches because that’s not why they went into these careers. They became coaches because they wanted to coach football and to impact young men.
“Even in the NFL, head coaches do not have general manager duties. One guy can’t be the ultimate evaluator, as well as the coach, the game planner, the cap expert, and all that comes with it. Today’s college football is run like a business, programs must build a hierarchy that is proper.”
Klatt offers the following suggestions to ease the coaching burden.
“The head coach should not be responsible for hiring everybody because then everybody answers to him. That’s not the position head coaches should be in – they should be focused on coaching football. Programs need to start building themselves to insulate the head-coaching position. Athletic directors should be hiring a president of football operations. That person should be in charge of hiring the head coach and hiring a general manager.”
That’s one man’s opinion, but with the contracts some head football coaches receive, being at the top of the pay scale brings with it many expectations and demands.
The scarlet & gray’s ruining the day for a record crowd of 111,000+ left James Franklin alone at the top with a growing number of wolves howling at his door. Winning is great, but losing to Ohio State every year (Franklin’s 1-10 record against the Buckeyes) is not something that is acceptable to Nittany Lions fans and the big-money donors shelling out greenbacks in support of the program.
On her way out the door in 2022 as PSU’s athletic director, Sandy Barbour presented Franklin with a departure gift: a 10-year, $75-million extension to his contract. Since arriving in 2014, winning has been frequent, except for Ohio State and Michigan. Franklin’s tenure has seen the coming and going of many under his command, but as of yet, the brass ring has been beyond his reach.
But that Barbour ‘gift’ has left him with many incentives, on top of the base salary, to get the job done. Included in the contract are $800,000 for winning a national championship, $350,000 for winning the Big Ten title, $400,000 for getting the Nittany Lions in the college football playoff, and $100,000 for winning Big Ten Coach of the Year.
The title “Big Game James” has not yet been earned, but Big Buck James seems to clearly fit.
