Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne fired first-year baseball coach Greg Goff last week. Goff, whose team went 19-34, was in the first year of a five-year contract. It cost Alabama $1.06 million to fire Goff, who was paid $450,000 this year.
It doesn’t take any time to connect the dots: Byrne hired UA coach Jay Johnson away from Nevada two years ago and last year doubled his salary, to $335,000. When Byrne left Kentucky to become the AD at Mississippi State, he hired Kentucky baseball coach John Cohen.
There’s not much mystery here. Byrne considers Johnson one of the top hires of his career. Given Alabama’s almost bottomless financial resources, he could offer Johnson more than double his Arizona salary to move to Tuscaloosa.
Arizona’s baseball tradition is far superior to Alabama’s, but a year ago, when the Crimson Tide was 5-19 in the SEC, it drew 11,500 for a three-game series against Florida. The potential is there.
If Byrne wants Johnson to be the coach to realize the Crimson Tide’s baseball potential, there’s almost nothing economically Arizona can do to stop it.
