Well, UConn fans, it’s official. Yesterday UConn announced that Kevin Ollie has signed a new five-year contract to coach the men’s basketball team for the foreseeable future. The contract, including retention bonuses, amounts to a whopping $16 million. Warde Manual brought a dump truck full of money to KO, and it’s exactly what needed to happen.
Now that the dust has settled, I’ve put on my lawyer hat and read the 22-page document to figure out exactly what this whole thing means. (Yes, I really did read the whole contract. You’re welcome.)
So those of you who have seen the reports about compensation may have noticed that Ollie’s base pay is $400,000 a year. But, in the first year of the contract, for example, he gets another $2.4 million in “public relations, consulting, and media fees.” So what’s the story with that? Well, Ollie is a member of the University of Connecticut Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, aka a union. And there’s no way the union would be on board with one of its members making $3 million a year, so the fee payments are essentially a shell game. He’s getting $2.8 million his first year and that’s his salary.
But wait! There’s more! KO will be entitled to retention payments of $200,000 on May 1 of every year that he sticks around. That’s another million on the table over the life of the contract. So if Ollie is still the coach this time next year, he will have made $3 million for the 2014-2015 season.
KO also gets some sweet, sweet bonuses if the team wins. He gets a month salary for winning a conference regular season or tournament title, and for getting into the NCAA Tournament, and another month’s salary for making the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eights and the Final Four, respectively. He gets three-month’s salary if they win the whole thing. That’s a lot of lettuce, my friends.
There’s also money tied to the team’s APR scores. There’s a whole paragraph devoted to the coach supporting and promoting academic performance among his players, and he gets paid if they do well. He gets $5,000 for any semester where the team has a GPA higher than a 2.8, and $10,000 for an annual APR score above the 930 minimum standard. If the team does poorly, and scores below the APR standard of 930 for two consecutive years, KO will be making a $100,000 donation to the UConn Foundation’s Scholarship Fund. So they’re really serious about the whole not-getting-banned-from-the-post-season-again thing.
Now to the stuff that might make you want to hurl: the buyout clauses. What’s probably most interesting is the fact that there are two different buyout scales, one if he leaves to coach another NCAA team (and really, like that would ever happen) and one if he decides to go to the NBA. The payments Ollie would owe the university are the same in either case for the first two years, $5 million if he leaves before May 31, 2015 and $4 million if he leaves between June 1, 2015 and May 31, 2016. After that things get weird. In the third year of the contract, if Ollie peaces out to coach a different college team, he owes UConn $3 million. If he goes to the NBA it’s only $1 million. And as everyone on Twitter was quick to point out, Kevin Durant becomes a free agent one month after KO’s buyout drops to $1 million. So there’s that. And that sucks. But what it means is that we can all say pretty safely that for at least the next two seasons Kevin Ollie isn’t going anywhere. As insane as some NBA owners are, $5 million is an outlandish amount of money to get a guy out of his contract. And there will certainly be other available coaches who don’t come with such a high price tag. So it seems like Warde has KO on lockdown for a while at least.
Also of note is the fact that if either Athletic Director Warde Manual or President Susan Herbst leave UConn, after one year Ollie can leave without paying a buyout. So if the way the university or the athletic department is run changes and KO isn’t feeling it, he can get out. This tracks with statements he’s made about making sure his players are taken care of and treated in a way he agrees with.
There’s also some interesting language about contract renegotiations. They can go back to the table after the 2015-2016 season, which seems pretty standard. But of more interest is the fact that if they change athletic conferences, there can be a contract renegotiation. Ollie’s new contract makes him the highest paid coach in the AAC, right above Memphis Coach Josh Pastner, who made $2.6 million last year. Now if UConn goes to the ACC, Ollie won’t be out earning Coach K and his nearly-$10-million salary, or Rick Pitino’s $5.7 million. It feels gross to just type that.
There are some other provisions as well. KO gets benefits such as a membership to the Hartford Golf Club and a $15,000-a-year car allowance. Ollie also has some to attend some specific events, as well as making television and radio appearances. Nothing to see here, folks. But there is some language about making sure the players are always wearing their Nike swag at practices and games. Because we all know how important Nike is. The contract between UConn and the sports apparel company is worth something like a hojillian dollars.
So that’s it in a nutshell, guys. KO is getting all of the money, and he isn’t going anywhere for at least the next two seasons. Warde did some good work on this one. Well played, sir. Well played.
