Barry Alvarez pays himself $118,000 for three weeks of temp work

Barry Alvarez probably isn’t hurting for cash, seeing as he gets paid a cool million per year to be the University of Wisconsin’s athletic director, which doesn’t actually sound like that demanding of a job, but whatever.

In the first week of December UW’s football coach Bret Bielema signed a contract to coach Arkansas next year, and it was decided that he shouldn’t coach the Badgers in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day. So the team needed an interim head coach for the game. The normal procedure in this situation is to name one of the assistant coaches to take over the top job for the team’s bowl game, but Alvarez, who had been UW’s football coach for many years before ascending/retiring into the AD position back in 2006, decided he’d coach the team instead.

As a reward for taking on these extra duties (which consisted of overseeing ten days of practice and coming up with a game plan, which turned out to feature running a total of three different offensive plays and punting a lot) he also decided he should be paid $118,000 on top of his regular salary. In addition, he also decided he should get a $50,000 if the team won.

They didn’t.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere about the Market and Meritocracy and how much money ends up being available for rewarding management when you don’t actually have to pay your labor force . . .