How the process or hiring and firing college basketball coaches has changed, in five easy pieces:
1. Sean Miller’s diminishing contract — it expires May 31, 2022 — will be Topic A until or unless the school and its attorneys provide clarity on the coach’s future.
In modern college basketball, there is little precedent of a coach with similar pedigree staying on the job with a mere 18 months remaining on his contract.
Tick, tick, tick.
Every other coach in the Pac-12 has a contract that runs through the 2022-23 season, minimum, and the UA’s chief competitors, Oregon’s Dana Altman and UCLA’s Mick Cronin, are working on deals that run through the 2025-26 season.
Such details can be persuasive in recruiting showdowns.
The last Pac-12 coach who worked on such a thin timeline was former UCLA coach Steve Alford, who entered the 2018-19 season with, like Miller, 18 months remaining. The Bruins became so exasperated with Alford that they couldn’t wait until season’s end to cut him loose. Instead, UCLA fired him on New Year’s Eve, 2018, paying him $3.6 million rather than endure three more months of anxiety.
Don’t feel sorry for Alford. He is being paid $216,000 a month by the Bruins through April, simultaneous to his compensation from his new employer, the Nevada Wolf Pack, who overlooked his UCLA failures and agreed to pay him $11.7 million over 10 years.
What a racket.
2. The next Pac-12 coach working an uncomfortable coaching platform will be Oregon State’s Wayne Tinkle, who has gone 42-66 in six Pac-12 conference seasons with an 0-1 record in the NCAA Tournament.
Tinkle lost his franchise player, his son, terrific wing forward Tres Tinkle, without doing much more than being so-so in a so-so conference. Oregon State is bound to pay Tinkle a $1 million retention bonus if he stays on the job through next season, at which time it would also have to tender him a new contract.
Uh, probably not.
Perhaps the Oregon State administration erred and did not make itself clear when it hired Tinkle eight years ago. The contract he signed includes a seven-part preamble in which it says the responsibilities of his job are as follows:
1. Present a powerful and positive image for the university and its constituents;
2. He must demonstrate honesty, integrity and adherence to all applicable rules and exhibit sportsmanship at all times;
Not until No. 5 does it say Tinkle must operate “a competitive program within the Pac-12.”
To its credit, Oregon State got its points of emphasis in the correct moral order. In modern college basketball, most schools would start with OSU’s point No. 5. It should be called the “win, baby, win” clause.
ASU coach Bobby Hurley could become a hot commodity if the Sun Devils, as expected, make a push for the Pac-12 Conference title.
3. Arizona State’s Bobby Hurley is about to break the bank. If he were listed as an entity on the Dow Jones Index, there’d be a mad rush to buy, buy, buy.
A year ago, Hurley was given a two-year contract extension, through the 2023-24 season, with a $700,000 “thanks-for-staying” bonus. He is being paid an average of $2.4 million per season, which is about $1.3 million per year behind Utah’s Larry Krystkowiak, who has been, let’s say, a shade above average over nine years.
If the Sun Devils are as good as projected — they could win their first-ever Pac-12 championship, which goes back to 1979 — Hurley will be the No. 1 name on the list for coaching vacancies at the blue-blood schools. Like Duke, right? I mean, Mike Krzyzewski turns 74 this season.
The penalty for Hurley leaving ASU before his contract expires, roughly $1.5 million, would not create a second thought at a place like Duke.
4. The Pac-12 has seen 22 coaches fired since 2002, for 23 jobs. Yes, the coach twice-fired was Ernie Kent, cashiered by Oregon in 2010 and by Washington State in 2019.
The man who hired Kent at WSU in 2014 was athletic director Bill Moos, now the Nebraska AD. Moos was also the man who hired Kent at Oregon in 1997. It was one of the most baffling hires in Pac-12 basketball history, ranking with USC’s employment of Kevin O’Neill in 2009, after which the contentious O’Neill had parted ways with Arizona, Tennessee, Northwestern and the Toronto Raptors.
Kent had gone 19-36 in the Pac-12 in his final three seasons at Oregon, which is almost impossible given Oregon’s resources. But Moos overlooked all that and hired his buddy, who then went 22-68 in conference games at resource-challenged WSU.
To compound the situation, Moos was already paying a $1.7 million buyout to the Cougar coach he fired, Ken Bone. Now Moos’ successor is paying Kent $4.2 million for not coaching at WSU. That’s roughly $117,000 a month through 2022.
Perhaps in coming years, athletic departments will create a contract that asks for damages from an AD who makes such bungled hiring choices.
5. Albuquerque has a robust basketball community that compares favorably to the atmosphere and energy of Tucson and McKale Center. For that matter, New Mexico’s “Pit” is probably a more well-known national brand than McKale.
But the Lobos haven’t been good on a national scale for years. In the last five seasons, UNM has gone 53-53 in the middling Mountain West Conference. Attendance at The Pit last year was 10,992. Capacity is 15,411.
Understandably, coach Paul Weir is under fire. He has gone 52-47 in three years and his contract runs through 2022-23. Last February, Weir’s AD told reporters “he’s staying.”
Dumping a coach and paying him off in the MWC requires more fiscal sanity.
The difference between the Pac-12 and MWC is, foremost, money. Weir is paid $825,000 a year, about one-fourth of what Arizona pays Sean Miller. But because attendance is down at The Pit, and because the MWC has almost no TV media rights money from ESPN and Fox to tap into, that $825,000 comes off as a really big number.
When UNM hired Weir away from rival New Mexico State — he was paid a mere $250,000 at NMSU — there was a legal battle over a $500,000 penalty for Weir breaking his contract.
After attorneys battled it out, New Mexico agreed to pay $450,000 to Weir’s old school, paid in monthly installments of $9,375 over seven years. But the Lobos didn’t simply take it out of petty cash. It removed the money from a retention bonus clause in Weir’s original contract.
Petty cash in the Pac-12? You’ll need a couple of commas.
