I voted for Sly Croom for Coach of the Year and was intrigued to see the top vote-getters so far...
1. Sylvester Croom
2. Skip Holtz
3. Bob Stoops
4. Jim Tressel
5. Mark Richt

ALSO, I've been a little obsessed recently with all things $$$ in sports (thanks A-Rod and Torri Hunter), so I was quite interested to start comparing college coach salaries (like it's any of my damn business):
http://coacheshotseat.com/SalariesContracts.htm

I'll go ahead and pick on my Masters alma mater: the head football coach at Syracuse makes a cool million, more than Chris Peterson at Boise State, Randy Edsall at UConn, and Al Golden at Temple, and the same as June Jones (Hawaii) and Rich Brooks (Kentucky).

I suspect Jones and Brooks are getting some $$$ from other sources, but $1 mill for Syracuse? Football?!?

There were a few suprises in the top 25, which contains just about all of the regular BCS contenders. These are base salaries and don't take into account other forms of remuneration. Thoughts? Do I just have too much time on my hands these days?

What Ole Miss paid to get Nutt:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071128/ap_on_...ississippi_nutt

College Football Live reported that Bo Pellini is likely headed to Nebraska.
What might that mean for Les Miles and Michigan???!?

Tressel's quite the steal. He's easily 1 of the top 5 best head coaches, but ranks only 11th in salary? He needs either a new agent or to go to a school that blindly gives pay raises & contract extensions like UT.

I'm surprised at Ferentz's salary. The Hawkeyes seemed to have peaked a few seasons ago & are back to mediocrity.

And just to show you I'm not biased, I'm a University of Texas alumnus, yet I think that Mack Brown's salary FAAAAAAR exceeds his coaching ability.

B Man,

Syracuse does have a long winning tradition, just not recently. Once McNabb left, things just fell apart.

I'm very surprised Robinson was given another year. His defense at Texas was very bend-but-don't-break, & although I was glad to see Syracuse take him away, the defense then was waaaay better than what we have now.

Les Miles is going to Michigan, according to ESPN.
Wow, for LSU to lose Miles and Pelini in just a matter of days ... Wow.

*** update ***

ESPN is reporting that AP has reported that Les Miles will stay at LSU. He may be giving a press conference soon???!?

Les Miles press conference/announcement coming up - it's 11:02 PST, and Miles should be speaking in 5 minutes?

Hmmm, they showed it taped. Miles was kinda hot (temper) and said, with great emphasis, that he's focused on his "DAMN good" football team and their game today and that he's staying at LSU. Hmmmm...

Michigan really messed this one up.

Or Les is just taking a page out of the Nick Saban book of denial.

Now the news is where coaches AREN'T going:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071207/ap_on_...ichigan_schiano
(Schiano says no to Michigan)

http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaaf/news?slug=ap...p&type=lgns
(Grobe won't coach at Arkansas)

http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaaf/news?slug=ap...p&type=lgns
(Willingham DOESN'T get fired...)

But there IS some movement: Navy's Johnson is headed to Georgia Tech (good hire, I think)
http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaaf/news?slug=tx...t&type=lgns

http://chronicle.com/blogs/facevalue/1192/...-football-coach
Boosters at Hawaii are raising $$$ to keep June Jones there. Jones is already making a guaranteed $1 million. Cute that Hawaii is trying to raise more, and Jones isn't undeserving, but...

The news brief also states that the athletic department hasn't committed to sharing its Sugar Bowl revenue with the rest of the campus. Ummm, WHAT?!?

June Jones is a bit of a prick huh?

Getting excited watching UCF/Miss St and curious how the Coach of the Year promo sponsored by Liberty Mutual was going/ended - Sly Croom was leading for weeks. Ron Zook won, but here are the final standings:

http://www.coachoftheyear.com/thewinners.aspx?coach_id=72
1. Ron Zook
2. Sylvester Croom
3. Mark Richt
4. Rich Brooks
5. Jim Tressel
6. Paul Johnson
7. Joe Paterno
8. Mark Mangino
9. Rich Rodriguez
10. Tommy Tuberville

Stewart will be the new coach at West Va., with a 5 year contract worth about $800,000 annually. My hunch is that his base salary will be about $200,000 and the rest will be comprised of appearance fees, etc. I'm sure he'll stand to earn more than $800,000 if he makes BCS Bowls and wins the Big East, too...

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=3178538

The drama behind the scened at Washington!:
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3734/boo...hletic-director

In short, UW was offered a bit of $$$ to fire coach Willingham...

I wonder if Willingham ever regrets leaving Stanford. He seemed to be the perfect fit there.

Stewart doesn't care about making 2 plus million dollars. His concern was WVU could go out and asssemble one of the top staff's in America by paying them in their worth. WVU just hired Associate Florida coach and outstanding recruiter Doc Holliday ( WVU alum). His salary will be close to half a million dollars. WVU also landed Kentucky DB coach to assume the same position at WVU. Also, WVU landed Marshall's defensive cordinator ( former WVU alum) who will take over as just secondary coach. All are receiving huge pay raises from their previous schools. Of course, WVU's Defensive cordinator Jeff Castell and DL coach Bill K said " no thanks" to RR's begging of them to go to Michigan with him. WVU's assembled an elite defensive staff.


Coach Stew is now looking at Offensive coaches now that the defense has been named which was priority #1 for recruiting. Doc Holliday's Florida connections are going to be huge for WVU and keep that pipeline going.


It's safe to assume WVU's staff will be a lot more experienced and better than at any time in Mountaineer football history and Rodreguiez has to be pissed WVU has increased the pay in some cases DOUBLED for the assistants.



That's what happens when you have a coach whose best interests are for the university and state and not for his own ego.

This makes the Washington situation look like child's play. Bizarre.

http://www.fanblogs.com/west_virginia/007429.php

the more we learn about him, the more I'm glad he hit the road to Ann Arbot

let the Michigan fools deal with him

The national media is now seeing the truth of what we've known since last year's flirting with Alabama. What else would you expect from someone who was having multiple affairs with women while smiling in front of the camera about being a family man. The difference between this year and last year was WVU did everything it could to see that he has the "resources" to win national championships. After his meeting with Michigan and wanted to talk with WVU, our administration declined communication with him, thus making him more furious at WVU. WVU did everything possible to ensure he received or was in the process of having the resources in place to become a top 10 program. UnLike Beilein, Rodreguiez was a home grown product. Beilien's actions were frustrating flirting with many schools after each season, but at the end of the day he wasn't a home town guy and he moved on and many WVU fans actually came out the winner with Huggins coming home to his dream job. Believe it or not, Huggins might have inflicted a blow to Rodreguiez's precious ego. Before Huggins coached in his first game at WVU, he personally met with boosters without ever talking to the media about the upgrades WVU basketball program needed in order to compete with Kentucky, Louisville, UCONN, and so forth. Instead of bitching to the newspapers, HUggins raised 25 million dollars by himself to build what will be one of America's top 5 basketball practice facilities. He did this the correct way. The basketball program was his puppy. He went to the Athletic Diector and told him what he wanted and asked if he could seek out boosters he believed would support he project. As ambitious as it was thought to be, he did it in all of 6 months through all private donations. W


VU's basketball arena is already oustanding and now will have a practice facility that's second to none. The point is Rodreguiez used the media to make WVU's administration as unhelpful in making his long list of upgrades while flirting with other jobs in order to get boosters together after the ALabama debacle to get everyone on the same page. WVU has the best football facilities in the Big East and is probably top 20 in America. Rodreguiez's requests were granted and he and his assistant coaches received raises. However, he could have gotten exactly what he wanted if he worked with the athletic program similarly to how Huggins sold WVU basketball. RR could have raised 50 plus million if he had gone a different approach. He was granted the requests, but lost a lot of respect among many West Virginians for holding the administration hostage.

The bottom line is Rodreguiez ego wasn't comfortable the shadow of Huggins presence and ability to unite and work with the administration, boosters, fans, and media without complaining of what WVU doesn't have, but highligting why his dream job should and will become a dream school for the nation's top recruits.




It's good to see the nation now seeing the situation for what it is. Here is part of an article out of the Charlotte Newspaper:





MORGANTOWN ? Having spent a few days ? and, on some points, a few weeks ? considering all that has transpired in this brutally ugly divorce of Rich Rodriguez and West Virginia, I have come to what I believe are some rational conclusions.
Some of them you certainly will not agree with or embrace, so feel free to dissent.

? Throughout the process of leaving West Virginia for Michigan, Rodriguez has done nothing brazenly illegal.
? His actions at times have seemed unethical and perhaps have been such. But ethical conduct is often in the eye of the beholder, and were your allegiances reversed ? i.e., if you were a Michigan fan and not a Mountaineer ? your perspective would change dramatically.

? All of that having been said, much of what Rodriguez has done has been slimy, selfish and vindictive and in the end that has cost him not only any shred of respect he ever earned from West Virginians (let’s face it, that ship has already sailed), it will also be his undoing as far as his national reputation is concerned and in his attempt to barter down or out of the $4 million buyout clause in his WVU contract.

I’m no lawyer and I never stay in a Holiday Inn Express, but that last part just seems to be the one unintended consequence of Rodriguez’s egomaniacal attempt to make certain that the next generation of WVU football coaches and players will have as little opportunity as possible of reasonably parlaying the framework of his success into any future accomplishments.

In other words, I can’t take the players, but I’m sure as heck not going to leave you with anything else.

Again, it’s petty and spiteful and reminds me a lot of my 22-month-old, who couldn’t care less about any of her toys until she sees them in the possession of her 4-year-old sister.

Little Annie has a wonderful vocabulary for someone not yet 2, but when she sees Grace with an Elmo book she had long since discarded, she is reduced to “Mine, mine, mine, mine.’’

I guess I can forget about looking for Christmas cards from Rich, whom I have known since long before he became a football coach of any distinction. But it’s hard to overlook what is obvious.

Anyway, let’s try to look at this without the rage.

On the morning of Dec. 16, Rodriguez had not yet told his West Virginia players he was leaving and was at least eight hours away from relaying his official resignation. That was also about the approximate time that he claimed to several of his assistant coaches that he had about an hour or so before Michigan demanded a decision. Yet it was also apparently the time he called at least one potential recruit ? quarterback Terrelle Pryor ? to tell him of his decision to go to Michigan.
Illegal as far as the NCAA is concerned? Probably not. That’s a body that can make rules about when players can be contacted, but would be in for a world of hurt if they tried to investigate everything that took place in those conversations. As a coach at a Division I college program ? whichever program it was at that precise time ? Rodriguez was allowed to call recruits and that’s what he did.

Was it unethical? It certainly was from a West Virginia standpoint. Technically, that call prevented West Virginia’s remaining coaches from calling Pryor ? and anyone else Rodriguez phoned that day ? for the rest of the week because it was a period during which the NCAA allowed only one phone call from coaches to players in a week’s time. But recruits were allowed to call the coaches to find out what was going on and, given the unique circumstances, the NCAA probably would have looked the other way had WVU’s remaining coaches tried to make one call. It created a huge mess for then-interim coach Bill Stewart, but at least by the book it probably wasn’t illegal.

And imagine for a moment that Rodriguez had done the same thing when moving from Clemson to West Virginia. Wouldn’t you have considered the ethics of it and yet looked the other way and said, ‘Hey, I like this guy. He’s digging into the rulebook and using it to our advantage.’’’

The other quasi legal point to be considered here is the new document-shredding allegation. That’s a bit trickier because we still aren’t 100 percent sure what was destroyed. The best guess here, though, is that they were indeed Rodriguez’s “personal notes,’’ as agent Mike Brown termed them, but that they were assumed to be much more than that by West Virginia coaches and officials who knew of their existence.

Imagine it like this: You’re the CEO of a corporation overseeing multiple department heads who, in turn, are overseeing 125 other workers. Just for kicks and giggles, we’ll call it the Mountaineer Family, which is what Rodriguez always called his team.

Now, as a department head you have much, but not all, of the same access to records and such as does the CEO, but the only thing you consider pertinent is those records that pertain to your specific workers. Perhaps you keep those specific records, perhaps not, knowing that they are always available from the CEO. Some of the information you don’t have at all, but it is readily available.

Then all of a sudden the CEO defects to another corporation. And rather than leave that employee information behind for his successor ? none of which in any way pertains to his new job ? he spends hour upon hour shredding every document he has.

Worst-case scenario is that what he destroyed was somehow incriminating. I don’t believe that at all, not for a moment. My best guess is that Rodriguez destroyed the files for no other reason than selfishness and spite. Legally he can argue that nothing, or virtually nothing, that was destroyed hadn’t also been available to the assistant coaches on his staff (even though most followed him to Michigan) and that his copies were “personal notes.’’

Technically and legally that may or may not be true. At least Rodriguez’s attorneys will argue to the ends of the earth that it is.

Morally? It just flat stinks.

As for the pending litigation over the $4 million buyout in Rodriguez’s contract, that’s where all of this rubber hits the road. Again, I’m not a lawyer, but I can read, and the contract refers to the buyout as “liquidated damages.” Until we went through all of this with John Beilein mere months ago, I couldn’t have told you the first thing about liquidated damages. But, at least in that instance, it seems that what the term means is the real ? or at least estimated ? monetary damage done to the aggrieved party. In both cases that is WVU, which lost a coach and had to recover from that. In the Beilein case it became very obvious very quickly that not only was the damage minimal, but the end result was perhaps advantageous to the university, which had no trouble and very little cost in hiring what many consider an upgrade, Bob Huggins, who actually came cheaper than Beilein. No court was going to rule that WVU had suffered $3 million in damage ? which was the Beilein buyout at the time he left ? and the sides settled on an amount half that.

This is obviously different. Yes, West Virginia got a new coach at a bargain basement rate ? $800,000 for Bill Stewart compared to $1.9 million for Rodriguez ? but it appears the school is spending most of the difference in order to hire a top-shelf staff. As far as real damage is concerned, Rodriguez stripped the program of most of the assistant coaches, virtually the entire strength and conditioning staff and considerable other support staff. Rodriguez’s well-documented calls to recruits even before he resigned could play into damages, too, as well as the intrinsic public relations hit the program took. Just look around and imagine what college football fans ? and certainly potential recruits ? are thinking about all of this. “What in the world is going on at West Virginia?’’

Now in addition to his baseline argument that WVU did not fulfill all the terms of the contract (that’s for a judge or an arbitrator to decide, so we won’t even go there), Rodriguez is sure to point to alleged harassment of himself and his family and his assistant coaches’ families as further evidence that he has been wronged and that he is the victim here. And, despite the feeling here that most of that is slickly marketed propaganda into which the Michigan media blindly bought (the same media, by the way, that fawned when he said he was shocked ? shocked, I tell you ? to learn on the ESPN ticker that he was being sued by WVU, which incidentally found out that it was about to lose a coach in whom it had invested almost $2 million a year the same way), that might have had a chance of influencing any ultimate decision regarding the buyout.

That is until it was discovered that Rodriguez and his cronies spent hours hunched over shredders, vindictively destroying notes and records for which they had absolutely no use, but would have been wonderfully helpful to his successor ? not in stealing Rodriguez’s secrets, but in simply having a record of what Stewart and Jeff Casteel and Bill Kirelawich and all of the players in the program had helped to build over the years.

But Rodriguez couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t be classy. He had to be Annie. “Mine, mine, mine, mine.’’ (Although Annie gets over it and quickly reverts to her natural sweetheart self.)

And that just might be Rodriguez’s downfall, because anyone who looks at this objectively will see that Rodriguez’s acts were not in reaction to any backlash, but rather right at the start of all of this. He called recruits hours before he even told his team he was leaving and most of a workday before he had his graduate assistant deliver his letter of resignation. He waited not even days, but hours, before shredding those “personal notes.”

The bottom line is that whether it was all shrewdly calculated or merely a first impulse, he made it as difficult as he possibly could right from the start for West Virginia to recover from his departure, which does may not bode well for any argument his attorneys make that WVU’s liquidated damages were minimal.

It was also vengeful and malicious and certainly has to stir at least some concern among his new employers about just what kind of traits their new Michigan Man embodies.

The twists and turns of Morgantown take another bizarre twist....

WV hiring process racially biased???

Another comical PR stunt by the RR camp:


Previous WVU Offensive Cordinator Calvin Mcgee whose African American was at the Michigan Press Conference in Ann Arbor sporting a Michigan Hat when Rich ROdreguiez was announced as Michigan's new football coach. It was known Mcgree would follow RR to Michigan. WVU asked if Mcgee woudl coach in the Feista Bowl befoe assuming coaching at Michigan.

Mcgee was NOT considered for the WVU position not because he was African American, but because he was in Ann Arbor with RR sporting a Michigan hat with plans to join the Michigan Staff. I think it's pretty common sense why Calvin Mcgee was told after the Fiesta Bowl why he was not a candidate. If he wanted to be considered a candidate his dumbass should have not been in Ann Arbor with RR and being intorduced as Michigan's new OC and would have stayed in Morgantown and been talking with the WVU administration about how to proceed forward instead of saying I am going to Michigan. Of course, after WVU demolished Oklahoma he might have had a change of heart and felt he shuld be a candidate, but only a fool would hire someone like Mcgee who had already decided to move on.



THis is nothing but more smoke screen from RR"s camp for doing everything to not pay the 4.0 million dollar buyout. He is giving Michigan a blackeye and only making a fool of himself on the national stage.


On a Side note, WVU did pay him the 300,000 incentive bonus for winning the Big East Championship that's written in the same contract as the 4 million dollar buyout.


That speaks volumes in it's self.

I interrupt the West Virginia whinefest to remind everyone that Mark Richt and Les Miles are two of the hottest men alive.

posts like yours aren't any good without pictures!

"to remind everyone that Mark Richt and Les Miles are two of the hottest men alive"

"bless your heart"

Of course after seehing who made the all hot team of outsports.com on the hom page, I guess it's par for the course and to each's own.


I guess we all have different or "higher" expectations on what is "hot".