The news-flash was of such inordinate proportions that soap operas lacked sufficient preference to escape being done-in by the press conference at the University of Kentucky on 06 January in which was announced the hiring of a new FOOTBALL COACH, Joker Phillips. Whoa...stop the presses or HD-TV or talk-radio...or whatever...earth-shaking NEWS! The fact that Phillips had been designated for the job since 2008 didn’t matter...this was NEWS!
Embarrassingly, Phillips will make only $1.7 million per year in the job (but only $400,000 from the university, not even as much as the UK president but just as much as Obama), putting him in tenth place among the 12 Southeastern Conference football coaches, but...hey, these are hard times right now. The hardship is tempered a bit by the fact that Phillips will get a free membership in a country club (at UK expense) – an absolute must; two late-model cars for both personal and official use (no word on who buys the gas!) and a bunch of free game-tickets to give away.
There’s more. Winning four SEC games will pocket him another $100,000, with eight wins worth $750,000 (okay, the latter an absolute impossibility with the former strictly iffy); another $100,000 for just winning the SEC East (six teams) in addition to the above; and beaucoup megabucks if he should get anywhere near a BCS bowl appearance. He even gets a cool $15,000 if two-thirds of his players graduate, an indication of just what’s important – WINNING!
Phillips hasn’t done all that bad in his years at UK in one coaching spot or another but he only made $150,000 – a mere pittance – in 2006, so he was raised by 61% to $241,245 in 2007. Odds are that he was well over the quarter-million mark by now. When looking at all the numbers involved, one can see how desperate/demanding a coach has to be in order to make the big bucks...all of them off the backs of 83 scholarship players, who get free education but take a lot of thumps in both practices and games in the process. Is it any wonder that the Texas Tech coach recently got banished before his own bowl game because of his alleged mistreatment of a player, mostly just not believing the guy actually had suffered a concussion in practice?
The hope is that Phillips will be eminently successful, but the point is unmistakable that money talks, with winning about the only consideration. Bonuses based on the backs of young men predispose toward pushing the envelope physically and mentally. This is not to say that winning should not always be the objective, only that the development of the players, nearly all of whom will never play professionally, should come first, especially academically and health-wise. In other words, there should be no bonuses based on the number of wins or other entities such as championships or bowl games. To award them is to denigrate the players to little more than chattel, driven like cattle, not to mention that bonuses imply that the coach will do his best ONLY for the money.
Phillips has come up with the theme for his tenure – OPERATION WIN. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, especially for the players.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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