I’ve been telling everybody who writes me worrying about the financial state of UVA Basketball, don’t worry, we have the money to play big-boy basketball.
Then I see today what Maryland is paying Buzz Williams, and, gotta say, sorry, I take it all back, y’all were right, I was wrong.
The Baltimore Sun did the public-records request thing that I do with UVA to get a copy of Williams’s contract, and, wow.
Maryland is paying Williams $5 million a year – the contract runs six years, and will pay out $30.3 million total.
Plus, the annual bonuses in the deal can net Williams an additional $950,000 per.
Maryland, you may remember, did a quick two-day national search after its guy, Kevin Willard, left for Villanova, saying he was concerned about Maryland’s ability to compete financially going forward.
Willard was getting $4 million a season from Maryland, and got a seven-year, $29.4 million deal to make the leap to Villanova.
OK, so, UVA was paying Tony Bennett a smidge over $4 million a season, by the terms of that phantom five-year extension that he signed last summer.
ICYMI
Bennett, as you know, stepped down in October, and the AD, Carla Williams, initiated a five-month search that ended with Ryan Odom taking the job.
I can tell you here that Odom wasn’t the first person formally offered the job, and I know who the first person was.
I’m not going to reveal what I know there because …
I’ve said too much already.
But now that I’ve teased you with that buried lede, I’ll move on to the part about what Odom signed for.
ICYMI
- We have Ryan Odom’s offer sheet: Still questions remaining to be answered
- UVA Basketball: What was Ryan Odom able to get in terms of money for his staffers?
Odom’s deal runs six years and will pay him $21 million, so, an average of $3.5 million a year, with bonuses that top out at $950,000 a year, which he would get the full value of if he were to lead his team to, in order, an ACC Tournament championship, the NCAA Tournament, then the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four, and finally, a national championship, along with a Top 10 finish in the national polls, and a national coach of the year award.
Bennett, in 2019, would have gotten $825,000 in bonuses under the terms set out in the Odom deal.
Where we are with all of this: it took us five months to get our second choice, and we’re paying our second choice 69.3 percent of what Maryland is paying the guy it needed two days to find.
And Maryland, I mean, come on, Willard had them 27-9 this past season, but they’d won three NCAA Tournament games total in the previous eight seasons, and put up a cumulative record of 70-61 in the previous four going into last season.
We’re not talking first-tier program there, is what I’m saying.
The athletics department at Maryland ran a $5 million deficit last year, for christsakes.
But they’ve got more money than we do, apparently.
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Chris Graham
