UVA Baseball coach Brian O’Connor was once wooed by Texas, turned them down, had his mentor, Paul Manieri, try to get him to take the best job in college baseball, at LSU, turned him down.
Now the news is, Texas A&M reached out to O’Connor, supposedly offered him $3 million a year, which sounds ridiculous even for Texas A&M, given that baseball doesn’t make money.
And the response from O’Connor: nah, I’m good.
That’s the reporting from my Omaha seatmate Greg Madia over at the Daily Progress, who dropped the scoop on Friday that his sources told him that O’Connor was not only not interested in the A&M job, but had not even spoken with anybody there about the job.
He had more sources on this one than I did, because I had zero sources – my folks-in-the-know have obviously been out for lunch under It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere rules the past several days.
The A&M job famously came open when Jim Schlossnagle left the school for Texas, hours after the Aggies had dropped Game 3 of the College World Series final to Tennessee, and Schlossnagle had blessed out a reporter who had asked him during the postgame presser about the Texas job.
The idea that A&M had not only reached out to O’Connor, but had also offered him $3 million a year, comes from the guys at the “Just Means Less ACC” podcast.
One thing curious there is that A&M was paying Schlossnagle $1.46 million a year, so we’d have to believe, if the “Just Means Less ACC” guys are right, that they’d be doubling that to get O’Connor.
Another curiosity: O’Connor, at last check, was being paid $717,111 a year at Virginia, though I’m still waiting for the updated figure from the contract extension that he just signed, and was announced on June 13, on the eve of UVA’s opener in the CWS.
I’ve filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get a copy of the new deal, and should have it in hand early next week.
A comment on the “Just Means Less ACC” guys’ Twitter page suggested that the holdup on A&M’s side was O’Connor’s contract buyout, which I’m going to seriously doubt, because I’ve seen the buyout clauses in other UVA Athletics contracts, and the standard is, much lower than this guy is apparently thinking, but the specifics for O’Connor will be in the contract details that we’ll get to see next week.
I think we can file this one in the Wild Interwebs Speculation bin, but I’m not complaining, because it gave me something to write about today.
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Chris Graham
