College coach with $18 million guaranteed contract regrets win at all costs mentality

University of Georgia head football coach Mark Richt got fired yesterday, just ten months after he got an $800,000 annual raise, which kicked his base compensation to $4 million per year, before “performance incentives,” which could have totaled another $1.8 million annually. Richt’s contract, which was originally signed in 2012, and extended in January through 2019, guaranteed him a minimum of $18 million over its term.

In addition, as is the custom among the lesser nobility in the New Gilded Age, the contract also provided him with various things that most people pay for themselves, such as the use of two new cars each year, with the insurance for them being paid by private donors, and a $3,600 annual clothing allowance.

Today Richt was noting how obsessed everyone seems to have become with winning football games: “Expectations have been built to a point where if you don’t win a championship it’s miserable around here,” he told reporters. I’m not picking on Richt in particular, since he’s merely repeating the lament of lots of big-time college coaches, who — no doubt sincerely — deplore the overt professionalization of big-time college sports. These days, it seems, it’s just like the NFL: either win big, or get fired.

Whatever happened to instilling character, teaching leadership skills, celebrating teamwork, and I almost forgot, helping “student athletes” get an education? The answer of course is that that’s not what he was getting paid $4 million per year to do. Like a comparably paid NFL coach, he was getting paid to win, period. In that regard, he was in the same position as his players, who, for all practical purposes, are just like NFL players. Except for the getting paid part.