The reactions to the news that UVA President Jim Ryan has finalized an extension with Athletics Director Carla Williams that includes a substantial raise for Williams aren’t trending in a good direction.
Fans and alums are in meltdown mode on social media over a raise for an AD whose football and men’s basketball programs are in free-fall.
Meanwhile, the blowback at the highest levels is on Ryan, involving the part about the substantial raise.
“The Board of Visitors Executive Committee approved an extension of her contract last June before football and now basketball completely fell off the cliff. But none of us were privy to the actual financials of the deal. My phone is blowing up,” a UVA Board of Visitors member wrote to me in an exchange of emails on Friday.
The extension with its 28.9 percent annual raise for Williams also isn’t sitting well with some in the athletics department, I’m told, because of cuts around the margins impacting budgets for individual programs – and again, this is what I’m being told, even the men’s basketball program has felt some of that pinch.
Contract details
The five-year extension, offered to Williams on Dec. 5, and signed by Williams on Dec. 18, will pay her $1,405,470 annually, with an annual performance bonus of $300,000, “based on meeting our mutually agreed goals,” according to the language in the contract.
In addition, Williams would get a 3.5 percent bonus relative to her base salary and licensing payments each year the UVA Football program plays in a bowl game, and a 3.5 percent bonus relative to her base salary and licensing payments for a Top 10 Director’s Cup finish.
That 3.5 percent figure would equate to $40,126.45, for a max of $80,252.90 if both of those goals would be achieved in a year.
The new contract represents a $300,000-plus increase in guaranteed total annual compensation from the four-year contract that she signed in 2021, and paid her $1.09 million per year, with an annual performance bonus set at $250,000, and no additional bonuses related to football bowl games or Director’s Cup finishes.
The contract is fully guaranteed, meaning, if Williams is terminated without cause – i.e. not for negligence or legal malfeasance, but, just because – UVA owes her money through the end of the deal in 2030.
The case for Williams
Williams certainly has backers within the UVA community who point to her success in raising money for multiple needed infrastructure improvements – UVA Athletics has, on her watch, finished an $80 million project to build a new football operations center, a $19 million expansion at Disharoon Park for baseball and the $19 million Palmer Park for softball, and the $75 million Olympic Sports Complex is on schedule to be open for business this summer, at last check.
In addition to the fundraising for infrastructure improvements, Williams has been able to get big checks from donors to make UVA Athletics more competitive in the NIL sphere, with one commitment from an anonymous donor to the football program worth a reported $10 million a year announced last month, ahead of Elliott landing a Top 25 transfer portal recruiting class.
Just from a bottom-line perspective, it would be hard to make the case in the business world that a CEO who has overseen hundreds of millions in successful building projects and has been able to build steady streams of incoming revenues that are dedicated to boosting the acquisition and retention of talent shouldn’t herself be retained, and with an increase in compensation.
The case against
The behind-the-scenes stuff is obviously significant, but the front door to the athletics department is success on the field, and fair or not, an AD is judged on the success of the two programs that make money – football and men’s basketball.
Football is trending down, with Tony Elliott, the coach that Williams hired after pushing Bronco Mendenhall out the door following the 2021 season, at 11-23 in his three seasons – note: the last three UVA coaches with 11 wins in a three-year span (Don Lawrence, Dick Bestwick, Mike London) all ended up being perp-walked off Grounds.
Men’s basketball, meanwhile, is going through what we hope is a blip on the radar, sitting, at this writing, at 8-10 overall, 1-6 in the ACC, in the wake of the shock preseason resignation of long-time coach Tony Bennett, which has Williams on the hook to find a long-term replacement at the end of the season in March.
It’s not 2019 anymore, is another way of saying it – men’s basketball won the national title in April 2019, football was in the ACC Championship Game and the Orange Bowl that December.
Men’s basketball is not where it is because of Williams, though she’s going to need to get the next hire there right, and her track record in terms of hiring is, at best, mixed.
Football was doing fine until Williams gave Mendenhall, two years removed from taking the team to the Orange Bowl, an ultimatum to make a major staff change, and he responded to her unwelcome intervention by bolting – and then her hand-picked successor, Elliott, blew up the solid foundation that Mendenhall had left him to start over from scratch, with the 11-23 record through three seasons the result.
The half-empty stadiums on football Saturdays in Charlottesville are the most notable count in the indictment of Williams’s tenure, the empty seats representing literally several million dollars a year of lost revenues for an athletics department that is struggling to pay its bills.
But, hey, she’s getting things built.
Podcast: Breaking down the Carla Williams extension, reaction
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Chris Graham
