ARE THEY worth it?
The University of Kentucky, as is its wont, shattered by a few lengths the prior standard for determining how much a basketball coach is worth, formally introducing John Calipari yesterday as its new man, paying him somewhere in the range of $3.95 million as an annual base salary to do so.
Calipari hadn’t exactly been making pauper’s wages at Memphis, of course.
And the annual spate of coaching openings has provided a recession-proof windfall for Anthony Grant at Alabama, Tony Bennett at Virginia and Mike Anderson, who turned his Missouri team’s run to the elite eight into a lucrative contract extension.
And once we get past our usual moral ambiguities about coaches skipping out on contracts, skipping out on recruited athletes, about schools that look the other way when their coach gets raided because they’re fixing to do the same exact thing to somebody else, the only question to ponder is an easy one, a simple one:
Are they worth it?
“Look,” one Division I coach, not close to Calipari’s pay grade but hardly hurting himself, said yesterday. “I think you ask the same question whenever you see people get paid astronomical numbers — ballplayers, actors, rap stars, coaches. Can I sit here and tell you with candor and honesty that I’m worth X amount of dollars? Of course not. That said, the profession pays what the profession pays. Schools make money off the backs of coaches’ sweat and toil.
“And please don’t forget — if we lose, we get an awfully big pay cut. To zero.
“Cal is going to win, and win big at Kentucky, because he’s awfully good at what he does. But what if he’s only as good as he was at Memphis — which was ridiculously good? Will that be enough for those folks? Getting to Elite Eights, Final Fours, at a place where that isn’t enough? You don’t think he’ll earn that money?”
The fact is, there is no such thing as winning on the cheap anymore in college basketball. Thirty years ago, after a lifetime under the El, DePaul earned old Ray Meyer a trip to the Final Four, his only one, and it was pointed out that, after only 36 years on the job, Meyer was making the princely sum of $21,000 per year. Calipari will earn, by Christmas of his first year in Lexington, more than John Wooden earned his whole career at UCLA.
And in one year, will earn more than St. John’s has paid Norm Roberts in five.
You don’t think you get what you pay for, you’re kidding yourself. It is no accident that of the four coaches who will work the Final Four this year, three — Jim Calhoun, Tom Izzo, Roy Williams — already have championship rings on their fingers and the fourth, Villanova’s Jay Wright, seems certain to have more than a few opportunities to get one before he’s through.
You pay for pedigree. You pay for success. Williams may bleed Carolina blue, but he wasn’t going to migrate east from Kansas unless the university showed him enough legal-tender green. Izzo is a loyal Michigan State man, he served a long apprenticeship under Jud Heathcote, but Spartan is merely his team’s nickname, not his own salary needs. And Calhoun? Well, as he himself so eloquently put it not long ago: He earns “every dime” of his seven-figure deal.
Are they worth it? They are if the Final Four is your goal. They are if you believe that basketball helps sell the university to the masses, a notion that makes professors wince but keeps athletic directors flush. Ask any citizen of Alabama if they think Nick Saban is underpaid. Ask any Floridian if they have a problem with how much either of their coaches, Urban Meyer and Billy Donovan, earn.
Ask a St. John’s alum if they would mind, even a little bit, if the men in charge of the purse strings chose to throw a bucket of money at Rick Pitino or Bob Knight right now.
You pay for pedigree. You pay for success. And you get what you pay for.
