Stewart Mandel Takes Note of Vols' Coaching Staff; Fails to Make Sense
Friday, January 30, 2009
I've written quite a bit about Tennessee stealing a march on other conference teams by paying their assistant coaches more than any other school. I know that Lane Kiffin identified assistant coaching pay as an area that was unjustifiably skewed towards head coaches. In other words it doesn't make sense for someone like Urban Meyer to make more than 10 times what his defensive coordinator Charlie Strong makes. Rather than demand $3 million Kiffin told Mike Hamilton at their first meeting that he believed he could put together the best coaching staff in America. And that he was going to do it by demanding less up front money for himself and spreading that money around to his assistants. To me that was the biggest strength of Kiffin, he's willing to surround himself with the most-talented coaches in the business. And he's willing to take less money for himself to do it. That's something that a less confident coach would be afraid to do.
The result is that Tennessee will be paying $3.3 million to their assistant coaches--the most in college football. But, and this is key, the UT staff as a whole still ranks in fourth place in the SEC when it comes to total coaching salaries-- a full $1.5 million behind Alabama. Now, predictably, people like SI's Stewart Mandel are wringing their hands over the horrible precedent this sets. Give me a break. I like Mandel, enjoyed his book, and think he's generally on point, but I think his really glaring flaw is that he tends to gets sanctimonious and moralize too much. Such is this case with this situation. Here's Mandel's take.
All told, the Vols' assistants will make a combined $3.325 million in '09, shattering the totals at SEC rivals Alabama ($2.405 million), Florida ($2.035 million) and Georgia ($2 million), according to data compiled by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Tennessee is so proud of this feat, it sent out a press release last week listing each assistant's salary.
Do you see what Mandel has done here? He's focusing on the assistant coaching salaries of other SEC schools while ignoring the head coaching position to justify his premise. What's more he's using a term like "shattering" when the salaries don't justify the term. Alabama will be paying their staff just $920,000 less than Tennessee (those salary figures he uses are a year behind as well). By putting those millions that the schools pay instead of the difference between the two, he makes the numbers seem greater. Alabama (920,000) Georgia (1.3 million) and Florida (1.1 million) looks less impressive in parentheses, don't they? If Tennessee paying $920,000 more to their assistant coaches than Alabama does is "shattering" what's Saban making $2 million more than Kiffin? Nuclear exploding?
What's more, each of these schools pay their head coaches much more than Tennessee does. In an age when chief executives are making tens of millions more than their subordinates, Mandel's written the equivalent of an article griping over how much vice-presidents of companies make. Swell.
Mandel could just as easily have written this sentence:
All told, the Alabama, Florida, LSU, and Georgia head coaches will make at least 1.5 million more than Kiffin.
Or this one.
All told, Nick Saban still makes $650,000 more than all 10 assistant coaches on Tennessee's staff.
Or this one.
Of course it's worth nothing that a big part of Tennessee's assistant coaching staff salary is tied up in Monte Kiffin (at least 1.2 million although he probably will cost closer to 1.5 million) which is still at least $500,000 less than than he made last year in Tampa Bay.
But Mandel didn't.
In other words, the focus of this article could have been on Kiffin helping to increase the pay for underpaid assistant coaches everywhere. Arguably this is admirable, being willing to redistribute the coaching income pie to those who work in positions beneath your own. But Mandel hasn't done that. He waits until the second page to even mention that Tennessee is still paying less than three SEC schools.
And here's the crux of his argument:
First of all (Claynation note: there is no second of all. Anytime you begin an argument with first of all and there isn't a second point, you're making a losing argument. Period). Tennessee's unique "model" was spawned out of necessity. Kiffin is a first-time college head coach who needed experienced assistants around him to have any hope of contending in the SEC. Should he achieve quick success, however, you better believe he'll be promptly rewarded with his own $3 million contract -- and it's not as though the assistants will then get pay cuts.
Yep, Mandel has identified a "problem", based an entire article on it, used outdated 2008 salary information and compared it to 2009 salary structure at Tennessee (the reality is that the top three schools in the SEC are spending more than he cites for their assistant coaches--for instance LSU giving $525k to Chavis, Trooper knocking down $320k at Auburn ring a bell?), and then used the hypothetical success of Kiffin to point to a looming disaster in college athletics.
In other words, if Kiffin fails, there's no basis whatsoever to anything Mandel has written. Everything in his argument is based on a hypothetically successful future. And that hypothetical future won't include Monte Kiffin forever (he's 69) so the UT defensive coordinator will probably end up making much less money in the future. Not to mention that even with Mandel's dire hypothetical prediction, Kiffin at $3 million a year, the combined UT coaching staff would still be $600k beneath the amount Alabama was paying in 2008. But that's too complicated to consider. We have to focus on the staggering "problem."
I'm not even going to get into the sensationalism of failing to note the important facts of this article until the second page. The point is Mandel has done much better work. He doesn't need to gin up controversies that don't exist. There are plenty of those that already exist in college football. The pay of Tennessee's assistant coaches isn't one of them. And Mandel knows it.
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