There is a reason Bill McCartney was able to leave so many players at home from the Aloha Bowl Christmas Day without worry.
It was the same reason he could unveil his new, pass-happy offense at the Fiesta Bowl in 1991 and not sweat the criticism.
His 15-year contract.
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“I’m here for the long-term,” said McCartney, the University of Colorado’s football coach since 1982.
“And everything I do is for the long-term. That allows me to make decisions and plans other guys won’t allow themselves the luxury of making because they have the pressure of needing to win to save their jobs.”
That’s why McCartney didn’t hesitate to suspend seven players between the Buffs’ regular-season finale and their Aloha Bowl appearance against Fresno State.
Weeding out potential problem players before next season was more important to McCartney than the outcome of the Christmas Day game.
Perhaps only four other Division I-A coaches in the nation can understand the freedom McCartney enjoys at CU. They are Michigan State’s George Perles, who signed a 10-year contract in 1987; Kansas State’s Bill Snyder (10 years, signed in 1993); Louisville’s Howard Schnellenberger (five years, signed in 1989; a six-year extension in ’93 extends contract through 2001), and Penn State coach Joe Paterno (a tenured professor).
If the shortness of this list surprises you, it shouldn’t.
In an era when even talk of an NCAA investigation can paralyze a program, schools are careful about getting wangled into long-term deals.
Yet athletic directors realize how much easier it is for a school to recruit if a coach can say he’ll be around.
With this in mind, universities and coaches have found middle ground by creating something called a rollover contract. Nebraska’s Tom Osborne and West Virginia’s Don Nehlen, for example, have rollover contracts.
When Nehlen agreed to coach at West Virginia in 1980, he signed a four-year rollover deal, meaning his contract would be renewed for four years at the end of each season. The only way the cycle would break is if Nehlen quit or the school chose to fire him.
The advantage of such a contract is that it allows the coach to tell a recruit he has a four-year deal and will be at the school as long as the student-athlete is. This way, Nehlen isn’t trying to recruit in the final year of his contract because it’s renewed each year.
But a school’s commitment through a rollover contract might not give a coach as much security as one might think.
The schools protect themselves by building clauses into a contract that allows the school to negotiate a buyout of the remaining three years of a coach’s deal. The obligation is limited.
In this way, both parties are satisfied. The coach can tell the recruit he’ll be around, and the school can dump the coach if it feels the need.
Long-term deals such as McCartney’s are rare, but other unique coaching contracts exist.
Consider the deal signed by Bobby Bowden, whose Florida State Seminoles won the national title last weekend.
When Bowden signed his last contract in 1990, it was advertised as a “lifetime” deal, implying he could coach until he decided to quit.
That’s not actually true.
During negotiations, Bowden told FSU administrators he didn’t want to coach past age 70. Bowden, 61 at the time, signed a five-year deal with an option to coach two more years.
“We called it a `lifetime’ contract because it will take him up until he’s 68 and he’s not going to want to coach for much more than that,” said FSU Athletic Director Bob Goin. “After that, we’ll just take it a year at a time and see how things go.”
Though Bowden is dearly loved at FSU, athletic department negotiators covered themselves. Bowden’s contract lasts only until he is 68, and even then, the school is in a position to dictate when Bowden’s “lifetime” is over.
Paterno’s contract gives him ultimate authority over when he leaves Penn State.
Because Paterno is a tenured professor, even if he is forced out of coaching, he can stay on university payroll as a high-salaried teacher for as long as he chooses.
While many coaches sweat out player arrests or academic ineligibility, coaches like McCartney and Schnellenberger can remain focused on the big picture.
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Consider McCartney’s decision to change his offense for the 1991 Fiesta Bowl. To this day, McCartney believes his decision was the best move for CU’s program, but he concedes he probably wouldn’t have done it if not for the security of his long-term contract.
“I would not have (changed to a pass-oriented offense). No, probably not,” McCartney said. “It would have made a lot of people mad, even though it may have been in the best interest of the program in the long term.”
McCartney said his extended contract has changed more than the way he coaches. It has quelled his interest in other jobs.
“I tell you what is prevalent in the coaching profession,” he said. “There’s a notion that the grass is always greener somewhere else. Everybody always thinks you have it better than they do.
“So when you sign a long-term contract, that puts all that to rest. You don’t look around every time a job opens. You don’t go through that process of trying to see whether that position is more attractive than the one you had. That really places a measure of integrity to your position because you recognize you’re going to be there for the extended future and there is greater pressure to do everything right. Because that’s how people are going to judge you.”
Schnellenberger agrees with McCartney and says he’s pleased to have administrators out of the way.
“They think you can do it like a business,” Schnellenberger said. “You put X numbers of dollars in, and if you do things right, you’ll get a predictable result. But when you’re working with young men, you’re not always going to get a predicted result.
“If you hire a good person and you support the program and give it time, it will ultimately succeed. It gives you a piece of mind and room to do what needs to be done to have success.”