People who have been critical of UVA AD Carla Williams for letting Mississippi State steal Brian O’Connor out from under her are missing a key point: she had to give him permission to speak with MSU about their open baseball job.
That’s a standard item in UVA coach contracts, which dictate that “the Coach shall not engage in discussions or negotiations with any other prospective employer during the term of this agreement without the prior written approval by the Director of Athletics.”
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This isn’t to say that O’Connor wouldn’t have signaled his interest to the folks at Mississippi State ahead of them signaling back they wanted to meet with him formally, which would have then triggered the need to comply with his contract by notifying and getting permission from Williams to be able to talk.
Key point here: nothing in the contract language says she has to let him talk.
Which tells you – well, what do you think that tells you?
There’s been plenty of speculation that O’Connor left UVA Baseball because of a fractured relationship with Williams, but her willingness to let him talk with Mississippi State would seem to indicate that if there was a fracture, the feeling was mutual.
I reported on Friday that O’Connor had been complaining behind the scenes dating back to last fall that he felt his program needed more money to continue to be able to compete on the national stage, and was rebuffed on that by Williams, who plans to put the bulk of the $20.5 million in House settlement money that can go as salaries to UVA student-athletes to football and men’s basketball, and doesn’t plan to increase the budget for baseball scholarships to the new NCAA upper limit of 34, but rather, into the mid-20s.
The infighting eventually made its way into the public domain, as O’Connor attempted to leverage public support for his program into pressure on Williams to change her mind.
One read of this back-and-forth is, it was against that backdrop that O’Connor sought permission to talk with Mississippi State, perhaps to escalate the pressure.
Again, Williams could have just said, no, you can’t talk with them, and that would have been that.
O’Connor, remember, signed an extension through the 2031 season just last June that increased his annual pay to $1.4 million a year, eighth-highest in college baseball, and way out of whack with reality for a program that reported just $2.6 million in revenues in 2024.
Mississippi State, which reported $3.4 million in baseball revenues last year, eventually offered O’Connor $2.9 million a year to take their job.
For a sense of how out of whack both what UVA was paying O’Connor was, and what Mississippi State will be paying O’Connor is, the American Society of Association Executives tells us that the median pay for CEOs of companies with revenues between $3.5 million and $5 million is $177,035 – 12.6 percent of what UVA was paying O’Connor, and 6.1 percent of what MSU will pay O’Connor.
The economics of college baseball make no sense.
Williams is correct to put more of the resources available to UVA Athletics toward football ($54.6 million in revenue in 2023-2024) and men’s basketball ($19.4 million in revenue in 2023-2024).
And just to be clear here, I wouldn’t want her job or the job of any other D1 AD right now. The $20.5 million ceiling for player salaries approved in the House settlement needs to come from somewhere, and we’re already hearing from fans upset, and rightly so, with big increases in season-ticket prices for football and men’s basketball on the horizon, and you have to wonder if you’ll eventually get to a point of donor fatigue as the dust starts to settle with the new NIL/transfer portal era having its own dramatic impact on the cost of doing business.
I don’t blame coaches for pushing for more money for their programs, but the reality is, there are programs that are not just going to be forced to try to do more with less, but outright discontinued – we’re already hearing this about the wrestling program at UVA, which several people on the inside are saying is first on the chopping block.
O’Connor needed to read the room, but then again, maybe he didn’t.
Because it seems to me that what happened here is, Williams reached her limit of complaining from O’Connor, whose team seemed to suffer from his divided attention – the preseason #2 Cavaliers started 12-11 and ended up missing out on the NCAA Tournament entirely – and she let him walk.
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Chris Graham
