Earlier in the day on Thursday, our colleague, Jerry Ratcliffe, wrote that he had talked with Brian O’Connor, to give the former UVA Baseball coach the chance to address directly why he’d abruptly left UVA for the head coaching job at Mississippi State.
“This is exactly what it is: after 22 years, I needed a change and a new challenge. That’s it,” O’Connor told Ratcliffe.
Simple, straightforward – pretty much, I was having a mid-life crisis, Jerry, and then I saw this shiny maroon sports car on the lot, and …
The sports car, turns out, had a bag of money in the trunk.
ICYMI
The world learned Thursday night that O’Connor, who had signed an extension with UVA just last June that paid him $1.4 million a year, making him the eight-highest-paid coach in college baseball, is now the second-highest-paid coach in college baseball, at $2.9 million a year.
Mississippi State Athletics went out of its way to make this public – which is to say, they didn’t make reporters file a FOIA request and wait five days to get a copy of the term sheet.
The former Mississippi Agricultural & Mechanical College wanted everybody to know that it had poached its new baseball coach from a blue blood with a $14.2 billion endowment.
The shocking annual salary, and four-year contract, puts a different perspective on the hue and cry from O’Connor from last fall and into the spring about Carla Williams not being willing to give him the resources he needed to be able to compete.
ICYMI
Turns out, money was the issue for O’Connor, but it wasn’t so much about the resources that he needed to be able to compete.
I say that, while also conceding that it’s hard to fault a guy for at least listening to people who want to double your salary.
That said, to make your decision to leave about needing a “change and a new challenge” is a bit rich.
Not surprisingly, O’Connor, at a public welcome in Starkville on Thursday night, which the MSU fans who flooded my inbox with taunts had told me would fill up the 15,000-seat Dudy Noble Field, and dramatically did not do that, made the move from Charlottesville to Starkville to be about “building young men and impacting their lives.”
We heard that here from O’Connor for years, and believed him, though it rings hollow now.
“I love making difficult decisions,” O’Connor told the MSU faithful. “I don’t shy away from them. It’s not an ego thing, right? But if you’re a leader in whatever you do, you can’t be afraid to make difficult decisions.”
Funny that he considers it a “difficult decision” to take a job paying him $2.9 million a year to run a program that has averaged a tick under $3.5 million in annual revenues over the past three seasons.
The MSU baseball program ran a $3.1 million operating deficit in 2024, according to data from the Sportico college athletics finances database – the 2023-2024 academic sports year being the most recent one for which full accounting is available – and that was with the head coach at the time, Chris Lemonis, who was fired this spring, four years after winning the national title, in 2021, making $1.33 million a year.
Back-of-the-envelope math suggests that paying the new coach $1.6 million more would bump the program operating deficit close to $5 million, and that’s before you factor in the increase in scholarships from 11.7 to 34, and the reported $2 million in House settlement money that Zac Selmon, the AD, has pledged to the baseball program.
ICYMI
The only real difficulty with any of this is with Selmon being able to eat $7.5 million-plus in annual losses to field a baseball team and keep his athletics program, which reported a department-wide $7.0 million operating deficit in 2023-2024, afloat.
You would think this is a Zac Selmon problem, not a Brian O’Connor problem, but it becomes a Brian O’Connor problem as the money losses mount, and Mississippi State, which operates on roughly half of the annual budget of SEC powers Alabama, Texas A&M, Tennessee and LSU, struggles to keep up.
This is relevant against a backdrop of something my colleague, Scott German, learned yesterday, from a contact within UVA Athletics, that among the issues that O’Connor had with Carla Williams, the AD, was that Williams wasn’t budging on how she plans to allocate the $20.6 million in House settlement money, with the ratio shared with us being, 70 percent for football, 20 percent for men’s basketball, and 10 percent split primarily among women’s basketball, baseball and men’s lacrosse.
On top of that, we learned, Williams has told the coaches of the non-revenue sports at UVA that they’re going to need to take on a much bigger role in fundraising for their programs.
We were told that among that group of coaches, O’Connor, by far the highest-paid in the group, was the only one to balk, and instead, he tried to play a stealth PR game, with leaks of Zoom meetings that had him breaking down his view of how he wouldn’t be able to compete without a significant bump in money for his program designed to put public pressure on Williams to cave.
ICYMI
Williams, to her credit – the UVA Baseball program ran a $3.4 million operating deficit in 2024 – held firm.
I say to her credit, because, let’s be real here: football (at UVA: $21.5 million operating surplus in 2023-2024) and men’s basketball (at UVA: $4.5 million operating surplus in 2023-2024) actually make money, so that’s where you have to prioritize your investments.
All things being equal, sure, UVA Baseball has a national championship and seven appearances in the College World Series, all since 2009, you’d put more money there than you would football, which has had three winning seasons since 2009.
All things aren’t equal: football brought in $54.6 million in revenue in 2023-2024; baseball brought in $2.7 million.
I doubt O’Connor was holding up Williams to also double his salary. That’s another instance of that Zac Selmon guy down there at MSU not being good at his job; he didn’t need to give Brian O’Connor $2.9 million a year to get him to leave.
O’Connor had been signaling since last fall that he was looking.
Selmon could have offered him a couple hundred thousand more, enough to make it look good, and gotten the deal down.
I do love this quote from O’Connor in his post-welcome event press gaggle:
“Zac Selmon was a big part of this. I felt like, if I was going to leave this place that I loved and worked at for 22 years, it had to be the right partnership, first and foremost.”
You can almost hear him thinking it out loud: sucker.
One other quote from O’Connor along those lines:
“There’s been a lot of schools over the years that have reached out about their jobs, but make no mistake about it, this was the right one for Brian O’Connor to take a different path in his career.”
The shiny maroon car, with the bag of money in the trunk.
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Chris Graham
