Cal84 said:
>I'm so ****ing tired of this myth.
I'm so ****ing tired of people in denial. Cal Athletics is running about negative 5 to 6 mill a year. When/if Wilcox has a good season and gets a medium sized offer which about quadruples his salary, that would inevitably come with a budget for coordinators/assistants and recruiting expenses which ramps up similarly. So now you are talking about 8-10 mill per year Cal Athletics would need to come up with to match. You think the AD has the authority to go -$15 mill a year? Think again.
And so when/if Wilcox and his staff get that offer, Cal Athletics can not match. Instead they must tell Wilcox, "give me some time and I think I can raise the money and make a competitive offer". Can Cal actually raise that kind of money? Who knows? It doesn't really matter since whatever school recruiting Wilcox will have surely made their offer with a 48 hr (or less) window. And so you are counting on Wilcox and his staff to give up on a quadrupling of their compensation for a maybe that Cal would give them something of undetermined size later down the road. This is not a recipe for success.
The claim that historically Cal has not lost a football coach to another university over pay is irrelevant. Because historically other schools did not have fat allocations from football TV contracts available to bid up coaching talent. Money which Cal has already allocated to pay for its non-revenue sports. Cal Athletics must make a decision to either 1) cut non-revenue sports to eliminate the deficit and free up money to be competitive in the long run in football or 2) continue as is with a lowest in the P12 football budget which allows lots of nice non-revenue sports to survive.
The "medium sized" offer that quadruple his salary would tie him with Urban Meyer for 4th highest paid coach in the coach in the country. So you start off on shaky ground.
Cal was already paying Dykes almost twice as much. It will not be hard to double Wilcox' salary if he shows enough success to get that kind of offer. It is very unlikely he will get an offer to quadruple his salary. If he does, he will have had to have had massive success here.
His salary increase will be paid by donors. It is not coming from the general athletic department budget. Donors ponied up for Monty, Braun, Tedford. They negotiated with Snyder to pony up, but the chancellor nixed it. There was no amount of money that was going to stop Mooch from taking what was at the time the #1 football coaching position in the world. Donors are definitely tired of throwing good money after bad, but they have shown they will pay for proven success. If he develops a top ten program, the donors will pay what it takes.
TV money is just a new argument to keep the same tired old worry going. There is always a reason why now is different from all the times people pulled the fire alarm. So don't watch Cal football then. If we lose we lose. If we win we lose. What is the point? I have to agree with Yogi on this one. This is a myth. What is more, it is a myth that hurts the program.
I agree with you about cutting non-revenue sports - I've said this for years. Shore up revenue sports and you can add programs back if you become financially stable enough to do so. A far bigger concern is not that Cal won't pay a head coach as they've figured that one out. It is that they won't pay all the assistants enough as they have not proven they understand that necessity.
That said, this worry is very premature. Wilcox is not going to get a huge offer for making a 5-7 team go roughly .500. (though it is a bigger accomplishment than it might seem on paper). Baldwin is not getting a big time offer based on this year's results. DeRuyter is not getting a HC offer for a while after his record at FSU. He will need to rehabilitate himself more. He could get a DC offer. But we were willing to pay Tosh a lot, and now that DeRuyter has proven himself, I don't see a problem matching.
I would love to see the staff get a one year extension and a nice bump in pay for accomplishing this year's goals. They have done a good job. As good as could be expected. They have not proven themselves to be in the $6M HC and $2M per coordinator range. I'll "worry" about that when it comes to pass. Or, more likely I'll be massively celebrating somewhere based on that success.
