MORGANTOWN — OK, let’s be really honest here, if you’ve been a WVU sports fan for a while, the term “buyout” is truly a painful subject.
Like having Paul Skenes throw a bowling ball as hard as he can and hitting you in the face with it type of pain.
The reason is simple: WVU’s athletic department hasn’t exactly been a loser in the gambling game that is contractual buyouts with its coaches, but the school hasn’t exactly been a winner, either.
And remember we used the word gambling, because that’s exactly what these things are, which we’ll get to in a moment.
The buyout clause became an actual topic of discussion in these parts back in 2008, beginning with former football coach Rich Rodriguez and former men’s hoops coach John Beilein.
Both left for Michigan. Both wanted to owe WVU less money for doing so.
Even when WVU won with Rich Rod — he and Michigan split the full $4 million owed — it still took a public relations hit by having the case drag out for months through the courts and depositions’ phase.
WVU got money from Beilein, too, but the hoops coach negotiated a $1.5 million settlement when his contract buyout said he owed $2.5 million.
Not exactly a major win for WVU.
WVU’s biggest buyout win just may be Bob Huggins, in that the school didn’t owe him one when it forced Huggins to resign last July.
Of course, it didn’t owe him one because of all the sorted trouble Huggins had fallen into, creating tons of grief for the university along the way.
Honestly, no one was even sniffing a win in that situation.
WVU’s biggest loser in the buyout game is Neal Bown, who was fired Sunday.
Now the school is on the hook for roughly $9.5 million, which will be paid to Brown in installments spread out over the next four years.
“Brown’s buyout” has been discussed in social circles for the last three years, covering the amount of time Brown was on the hot seat, then off it and then back on it again this season.
He wasn’t fired in 2022, after going 5-7, because it was believed socially his then-buyout of roughly $12.3 million was too much money for WVU to fork over.
Instead, the school fired the athletic director, Shane Lyons, who handed Brown that contract extension.
Oh, by the way, WVU owed Lyons $2.149 million for his buyout.
Brown received another extension nine months ago, this time negotiated by Wren Baker, who managed to bring down the cost of Brown’s buyout in the case of the school firing him, which it did.
“I know that people feel different ways about the extension we gave Neal,” Baker said on Tuesday. “I thought it was a very fair deal. It didn’t change the total amount owed to him very much and it distributed it differently. Because we went from 100% guaranteed to 75%, it reduced this year’s commitment by $1 million.
“I thought where we arrived was very fair to everyone. I defend that position. People can criticize that decision, and that’s fine.”
Now that we’re through with the history lesson, we get into the gambling, as in all a university — any university — is doing is gambling its money on a buyout clause.
The school feels it just hired the second coming of Knute Rockne, and so it will gamble tons of dollars that make no sense for nothing more than to make a statement to its fan base that it got the program’s savior.
And if another school wants to come in and try to take that savior away, said school is going to have to pay dearly.
That’s what a university is betting on, except recent history tells us it’s the wrong move to make.
When Texas A&M hired Jimbo Fisher in 2018, do you actually think it did so with the intent that it planned to fire him six years later and would have pay him $77.5 million?
No way did Texas A&M ever think it was going to shell out a penny to Fisher for a buyout, because he was going to be there forever. That was a gamble Texas A&M lost, big time.
“There are no guarantees,” Baker said.
There is one guarantee, which is to say Baker will sit down in the days to come with a new WVU football coach to negotiate a contract.
And said contract will have a hefty buyout clause. Maybe not Jimbo Fisher-hefty, but a lot of money nonetheless.
“People can say, ‘Well, I wouldn’t guarantee X,’ ” Baker said. “Then you’re not going to get a very good candidate, because other people in the marketplace will.”
And the majority of those people in the marketplace will one day owe a lot of money to coaches who, quite frankly, couldn’t win a Pop Warner championship.
What would be great to see one day is a school stand up and say these buyout clauses are insane.
What would be great is for schools to realize that there’s a better chance they are about to hire a coach who is more likely to be fired by that school than be stolen away by a bigger school.
That’s just simple analytics there.
I would rather have my coach hired by another school and get absolutely nothing in return than to pay a bad coach the equivalent of a third-world country’s economy to go away.
For those who disagree, you can rest easy in knowing that’s not going to happen when Baker makes this football hire.
“It’s all relative to who your target is, and you have to be competitive,” Baker said. “Those agents, when you get ready to talk to them, they’re going to show you all the salaries in your league, how much of it is guaranteed and what the incentive packages are.
“They’re going to say if you really want to send a message, then you’re going to be as committed as school X. There’s a back and forth of that. I think we’ve done a really good job here of being fair and understanding what their perspective is and what the institution’s perspective is.”
