LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- When the University of Louisville brought Howard Schnellenberger home from south Florida with his national championship and Super Bowl rings, it was the hire of the year in college football.
It was December 1984, a year after Schnellenberger won his national title at Miami.
Schnellenberger’s opening salary was $140,000 a year, plus another $50,000 in deferred income. Let’s go ahead and round the price tag up to a quarter-million dollars with other goodies included in the contract.
According to my inflation, cost-of-living calculator, the value of Schnellenberger’s initial contract today would be about $625,000.
I don’t have to call a single athletic director to advise you that $625,000 won’t get you a competent offensive coordinator in 2021. At $625,000, you can’t shop in the bargain aisle.
As we have discovered in the last week, the going rate for the top coaches in the market is closer to $10 million, at a minimum of eight to 10 years.
That is the reported price that USC had to pay to get Lincoln Riley to leave Oklahoma and that LSU dropped on Brian Kelly to jilt Notre Dame.
Ooops. Better clarify that. Kelly agreed to leave Notre Dame while the Fighting Irish (11-1) still have a 15% chance to compete in this season’s college football playoff, according to the projection at the fivethirtyeight.com website.
Unlike Schnellenberger, Riley has not won a national title. Neither has Kelly. In fact, their combined record in the college football playoff is 0-5.
They’re not Nick Saban, who certainly seems deserving of a major bump from his $9.75 million compensation package after this season, even if he does not lead Alabama to a national championship for a seventh time since 2009.
The market is the market. Coaches get what they can get. The free market system remains undefeated. Nobody is forcing either private (USC) or public (LSU) institutions of higher learning to pay these prices.
It’s a perilous profession. One day, a coach gets confetti and a parade. The next day, he’s unemployed. Ask LSU’s Ed Orgeron, who was fired less than two years after winning the 2019 national title and eight days after losing to Kentucky.
Dan Mullen did excellent things at Mississippi State, developing Dak Prescott at quarterback and ascending to the No. 1 ranking after 11 weeks of the 2014 season. Mullen was considered the Quarterback Whisperer before Riley stole his title.
It’s also a predatory profession. Florida had to have Mullen and big-footed Mississippi State to fetch Mullen out of Starkville for six years and $36.6 million in 2017.
Mullen went 29-9 over his first three seasons, prompting the Gators to extend his contract through 2026 and upgrade his salary to $7.6 million. He was the next Steve Spurrier or Urban Meyer.
The story outlining all the details is dated June 1.
Of 2021.
Mullen was fired 173 days later. Actually, Mullen was the next Ron Zook or Will Muschamp, with a more expensive price tag. That doesn't sound like the way the Harvard Business School would advise to run your operation.
The Gators will pay him $12 million over the next six years not to coach their football team.
The hysteria over the moves made by Riley and Kelly since last weekend has pushed college football to the top of the news cycle. The numbers are intoxicating. The media has been gaga with what wonderful times these are. Fans can’t get enough.
Happy days are here again for USC and LSU, two proud programs who aspire to be what Alabama and Clemson have become, the two biggest dogs in the game.
Numbing disbelief reigns at Oklahoma and Notre Dame. They have always considered themselves destination jobs. A taste of the stepping stone life has been a humbling and sobering jolt.
Now it will be their turns to ante up and poach a coach from another program. They say that one day the salary bubble will burst and the coaching carousel will slow. This can’t be sustainable, not after you can see more empty seats in the COVID-19 world.
But not yet. Not this year. It’s only gotten sillier and more expensive.
Schnellenberger won his national title at Miami in 1983 before the playoff era, but he retired with a perfect 6-0 record in bowl games and that shiny ring that he loved to show recruits.
College football is smoking something today, and it’s not the same stuff that Schnellenberger put in his pipe at Louisville.
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