Rick Barnes Gets A Raise and All Hell Breaks Loose

Excellent recap, srr. I would expect nothing less.

Losing freshmen to the draft is like getting dumped. Hopefully, the NBA and the players agree to a two-year college requirement and the entire product will improve.

As to Barnes, winning a NC would fix a lot of problems. It did for Mack Brown, who might well have been looking for work after 5-7, had his team not stopped Lendale White and had Vince Young on its side.

I’ve been posting those revenue stats wherever people are grumbling. Personally, I see nothing wrong with giving Rick a chunk of what he brought to the bottom line. I assume they made at least that much again this year. Actually, I assume he added another 8 to 10 percent.

As long as Barnes keeps recruiting talented players, he’ll have a chance specifically to do what Jim Calhoun did this year, in terms of winning with a youthful roster (even though Barnes could have done it… I don’t want to digress).

But the tournament is a lot more of a crap shoot than people right now want to think it is, more so than even when Barnes first arrived in Austin. IMO, the two-year requirement would go a long way toward making it harder for VCU and Butler to do what they have done. Barnes would benefit more than most because his good players always have seemed to tip toward earlier exits than later when departing ahead of schedule.

That said, when Steve Fisher and Jim Harrick have won national championships, when it took Roy Williams and Boeheim as long as it did to win, when Dean Smith and John Thompson had only three championships between them, this says a lot about how hard it is to win, how much good players have to do with winning, and how important it is to make a championship run when it all comes together.

I’m not particularly afraid of Barnes leaving at some point, but in my view this is not the time to cater to people wondering where you buy torches and pitchforks.

Speaking of perception…Barnes damaged his reputation with fans when he made his infamous statement about not caring about championships and only caring about getting players to the NBA. He would have saved himself a lot of grief by never uttering those words.

This year’s list of ‘one-and-done’s only reinforces the idea that Barnes isn’t about winning as much as he is about making Texas a comfortable destination for elite players who don’t want to invest in a program and just want to take the shortest, conflict-free path to the NBA.

I know this perception isn’t entirely true and Barnes’s comments likely came in a moment of pique, but it will likely haunt his days in Austin unless he either consistently wins the Big 12-2 or more consistently coaches successful runs in the tourney.

dislike. i want Stevens.

$ Bill called DeLoss to ask permission to talk to Rick and he parlayed it into a raise. He’s a pretty sharp guy to take advantage of the situation at A&M.

I play, coach stays. He goes I go.

We give ole Rick a million and change every year and he brings in almost 15… all things considered, I say that aint such a bad deal.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/18/news/companies/basketball_profits/index.htm

Anyone who bitches about Longhorn coaches getting paid like top ten coaches want to kill Longhorn athletics. F*ck those people, on principle.

To put it another way: let’s pretend for a moment that Longhorn athletic money is fungible enough to pay for any education-related good. $200,000 is roughly enough to hire four schoolteachers of little-to-no tenure. Meanwhile Texas has shed 12,000 jobs in the school system over the past three years. $200,000 is about the amount it would take to establish a single $5000 scholarship fund. That’s less than the average increase in full-time undergrad tuition at UT since I first attended 15 years ago; multiply that by 35,000 or so, repeat every year, and you start getting a handle on the tuition problem. For undergrads. 200 grand is literally a drop in the bucket and it helps ensure that a dedicated football school like ours gets to see a Kevin Durant or T.J. Ford every once in awhile. And that helps drive fundraising for the school in general, etc., etc.

But the mainstream sports press drives traffic by finding and harping on controversy, and during sports offseason (i.e., baseball season) their seeking behavior gets most desperate because ratings are down across the board. It’s f*cking annoying and the main reason I do most of my sports reading on clever blogs and whatnot, where the authors have more respect for the intelligence of their audience.

And I hate to say that any guy whose byline is accompanied by a headshot of himself with a fauxhawk is right about anything, but…I’ll be damned, Gary Parrish is right about this. Mark your calendars.

Three issues here, IMO. One of which really pisses me off.
 
1. Politicians are so lazy and stupid. They know as well as we do that Barnes’ raise didn’t come from a single dime of public money. Instead of educating their constituency, they condemn it and say “it looks bad.” No. It doesn’t. It doesn’t look bad to me when our country is in a fiscal crisis and Mark Zuckerberg makes billions off of Facebook. One had nothing to do with the other. All of the money in the world doesn’t sit in a cauldron and an extra spoonful for me means that you don’t get to eat. Instead of doing their civic duty and framing the situation correctly, they default to dumb, envious populism and focus on “perception.” Perception informed by ignorance. They have provided a tiny bipartisan microcosm of of why our country is in the shitter: the inability to speak truth to constituents because it might personally inconvenience them.
 
2. Do we want to pay our coaches well? If so, how is that best measured? There are only two reasonable measures. Profit and prestige (i.e. wins). DeLoss Dodds probably sees it as 75-25 slanted towards profit. I’m more of a 50-50 guy. I value hardware. I’m like a hairdresser. I love shiny trinkets that come with titles on them. Belmont likes Taco Bell ads and naming the field after ambulance chasers. I’m honestly surprised that Bevo doesn’t have GoDaddy.com body paint. Did Barnes deserve a raise? Probably not by my calculus. But if you’re a profit guy, his raise is justifiable.
 
3. To Dagga’s point, do you want a big salary in our budget? Yes or no? When Barnes goes, we have the possibility of going after any coach in the country save a half dozen. Do you want to have that ability or not? Similarly, Dagga’s point about fundraising is big. When our athletic teams do well, money pours into academic giving. The zero sum game mentality is maddening, to say the least.

Similarly, Dagga’s point about fundraising is big. When our athletic teams do well, money pours into academic giving.

Unless things have changed a lot, I don’t think that’s true. Winning causes athletic gifts to go up. Applications go up. Academics aren’t affected much. At least, that’s what I understand.

But high D-I is all about marketing, that is true.

And I agree with Dagga, Parrish has it right.

1. I think everyone realizes how difficult it is to win the national title.

However, Barnes’ problem isn’t so much that he hasn’t won a national title, but instead how he’s been unable to parlay the talent he brings to the 40 Acres into a more elite level of success. Failing to reach the Sweet 16 in 8 of your 13 yrs, including 4 of the last 5, doesn’t make you a Top 10-level coach, no matter how you spin it.

Furthermore, the way his teams have suffered late-season swoons don’t help w/ the perception that Barnes isn’t an elite coach. He could’ve won some more conference titles or had outright titles if his teams wouldn’t consistently be prone to head-scratching upsets.
  
2. Barnes’ biggest problem, which has been much discussed here, is offense. Bring in someone to take care of that side of the ball & all this negative talk about Barnes will disappear.

Barnes has the resources available to truly make the program elite (except for the lackluster fan support, in terms of noise if not putting butts in seats), but hasn’t come to terms w/ his coaching deficiencies. Only he can help himself.

3. I agree w/ everything Ricky wrote above.

4. From the article I read, the most vociferous political opposition to Barnes’ most recent raise comes from an Aggie & a politician whose district includes A&M, so you have to consider the Aggie angle to the noise.

Bob –
 
My understanding the last time this came up with Brown and his 5 million dollar contract is that there’s a non-correlation at schools in general (except the year after a national title in men’s basketball or football), but the Texas administration have acknowledged an observable relationship at Texas.

Scipio, I couldn’t tell, which of your three points pisses you off?

Bob/Scip – athletic donations are the lion’s share of the increase, in any case. We can all agree on that. But it’s not like giving to the academic side of the school isn’t all earmarked either. People who are pissed about how charitable funds are lopsidedly distributed around the school should be more pissed at a different class of giver: the donors who prefer to fund personalized wall-bricks at the Law School rather than having their donations used to pay for an extra Spanish assistant professor. If you talk to the serious critics of UT’s financial situation that’s their #1 concern, and it’s not going to go away. Vanity spending is endemic to all charitable giving. But the most egregious cases of donation waste at the school are not made to the athletic department, which does perhaps the best job on campus of driving charitable funds toward improvements that help the department’s bottom line.

Scip, thanks for the info.

Dagga, the way I heard it expressed by someone working at UT was that no one wants their name on infrastructure. My own example: There are a lot of areas of the alumni center that have names on them, but as far as I know, the restrooms are still available.

no one wants their name on infrastructure.

I was at the PCL today and that show-off HenryJames has his name all over the PS 2116’s.

“The Princess Casamassima” my assima.

The possessive of Barnes is Barnes’s. The possessive of barns is barns’.

If I give $200 to the school, you think I could have a stall dedicated to me? That would be bizarrely awesome. I’d pay for the name plaque, too.

And yeah – Mack is good at getting his mid-level donors – the ones who just want good seats, not necessarily the luxury boxes – to give to their general fund. That’s a big reason why their dorm food is top-notch and so on. If the University as a whole could do the same, a lot of the bitching would stop.

However, Barnes’ problem isn’t so much that he hasn’t won a national title, but instead how he’s been unable to parlay the talent he brings to the 40 Acres into a more elite level of success.

I’ve suggested that just a couple of extra years from the right players could have made a huge difference. TJ Ford in ‘04 (not that I would have expected that). Aldridge in ’07 (same thing). Daniel Gibson in ’07. DJ Augustin in ’09. If Durant had come in ’06 or ’08, those are potential NCs. A lot of these really good players didn’t play together, or play together enough. That’s not really Barnes’s fault.

Failing to reach the Sweet 16 in 8 of your 13 yrs, including 4 of the last 5, doesn’t make you a Top 10-level coach, no matter how you spin it.

Actually, it does. Over Barnes’s tenure, here are the schools that have more S16s:
Duke (11)
Kansas (8)
Michigan State (8)
UConn (7)
Kentucky (7)
UCLA (6)
UNC (6)

The possessive of piss off is piss off’s.

Bob,
I agree with what you are saying, though my only criticism would be that Barnes should have done a better job of bringing in elite talent in those years after he lost his best player.

It seems to me the biggest difference between our program and Kansas, Duke, UNC and any team that Calipari coaches is that we bring in one stud every couple of years and they bring in multiple studs every year. We get lucky when that elite player combines with good role players and we often make a run, they make a run almost every year even though they are generally losing more players early to the NBA than we are.

Barnes seems to be upping the talent collection year-in-year out and hopefully that will pay dividends if he can keep it up. All it might take is to get lucky and have a guy like Kabongo stay an extra year while bringing in another haul of talented freshmen.

I guess our numbnuts AD couldn’t figure out how to get a clause in Rick’s contract that says “No more money will be paid in the event of a late-season, horrific collapse”

Barnes’ collective record paints a brighter picture than his recent trendline, to be sure. The CoJo jump just stinks worse the more I reflect on it. 6’9" jumping jacks leaving early to be lottery picks is the nature of the beast. 6’1" freshmen leaving to scrub a D-League bench in the face of a punishing lockout is something else entirely. If I were signing the checks I’d have some pointed questions about the nature of Barnes’ conversations with Cory about his NBA prospects.

nobis, I would imagine Barnes would say that he and Joseph discussed the likelihood of Joseph playing the point the next couple of years at Texas and that he told Joseph that that chance would be slim.

Thompson could have improved at Texas. Joseph also… but he wasn’t going to be running the show. If Barnes was honest with him, it’s probably better that he left, considering the good review he got at the workout. If he’d played badly, maybe he’d be back. But it wouldn’t change his situation at Texas.

I agree with you in that, considering all the players who have left, Joseph probably is the least credentialed. That part does stink. If Thompson had stayed, maybe he comes to a different decision — but maybe not.

As I’ve also said, Barnes continuing to be frank with players regarding their role at Texas is going to be important in bringing in more players like Thompson and Joseph.

@ Bob,

1. There must be some reason(s) that Barnes can’t keep players on campus more than a year or 2 (besides NBA money). KU, Duke, etc., seem to have no problems in that regard.

Perhaps the players think or realize that Barnes’s coaching only goes so far, so they don’t gain anything by staying longer.

2. Re: Sweet 16 appearances – We’re comparing coaches, not programs. I realize there are very few coaches who have stayed w/ 1 school as long as Barnes has, so we don’t have many data points w/ which to compare. Therefore, a more apt comparison would be more recent seasons. Not making out of the 1st weekend of the Big Dance 4 of the last 5 seasons isn’t good. It’s definitely not indicative of a Top 10-level program.

Joe, I’m sorry if the facts contradict your point of view. You’re still welcome to it. Don’t let me stop you from moving the bar.

I suppose you can find 10 coaches you like better than RB. But you won’t find 10 better that would come to Texas to replace him.

Belmont likes Taco Bell ads and naming the field after ambulance chasers. I’m honestly surprised that Bevo doesn’t have GoDaddy.com body paint.

We’ve thought of having two scantily clad GoDaddy Girls ride Bevo around, but we’re concerned about accusations of bestiality.

I dunno Joetx. Some counterpoints:

1) The guys who left early in the Barnes era that shouldn’t have are Evans, Tucker, Gibson (arguably), Bradley, and Joseph. All of them are tweeners to some degree that can’t effectively play point or in the paint in the NBA, and there’s not one of them that would have catapulted the next year’s team into championship contention had they stayed.

2) In fact, I think Evans and Bradley are the only two who could have arguably improved draft position by staying; the other three are classic tweeners, second-rounders at best no matter how long they stayed. Hard to blame the latter for choosing to collect a paycheck when they know that sticking around an extra year probably won’t increase the size of the check.

3) Everyone else who left early is currently (or is about to be) a millionaire in the League and I don’t think it’s fair to blame Barnes when the right decision for those kids is pretty obvious. You don’t look a seven-digit gift horse in the mouth.

4) Duke is different. They’re Notre Dame Football in the 60’s; the place all the top athletes across the nation that value academics or learning to coach want to go. Those kids are going to stick around longer on average. And even Coach K lost guys who would have made a difference had they stuck around, like Maggette.

5) KU has the same problems as UT under Self, actually, and some would say worse – just in the last two years, they’ve lost Aldrich, Henry, Selby, and the Morris twins to early entry, and he hasn’t convinced any sure-fire first rounders to stick around an extra year. But one year they got lucky with the guys who stuck around – Chalmers, for example, who’s perfect for today’s college game since he could routinely manufacture offense in college without having early-entry talent – and Self is generally better with the X’s and O’s. So he’s #1 in the Big XII, and rightfully so.

But with his recruiting and defense alone Barnes strikes me as a clear #2. Being #2 behind KU is nothing to hang one’s head about; Self is a Top 5 coach at a Top 5 program. The difference between Barnes and Self hasn’t been on the recruiting end as much as it has been about roster mismatch and creating efficient offense. So if Barnes can commit his players more fully to the new offense and find a couple Chalmers-types of his own (J’Covan?) I still think he can win one.

6) Point taken about Barnes’ recent track record. But the causes have been pretty obvious – without a penetrating point guard, his offenses have been bad-to-putrid against good defensive teams – and over the last year he’s taken the right steps to fix the problem. We have a system now. Kabongo is coming. A couple more seasons with good recruiting classes and some lingering upperclassmen to help teach the young guns a bona-fide offense, and we could be golden.

JoeTX,
Barnes isn’t turning out one-and-done players any faster than other top programs and in fact I imagine even Duke has more players leave early for the NBA (not staying until they are seniors) than Texas does over the past decade. Now obviously, getting guys to stay for another year or two is important, but teams like Duke are reloading with more elite guys every year.

I hope that by adding an offense, Texas will develop over time an identity that will help it weather some of the youth and inexperience by having the four-year guys continuing to improve on the offensive end and knowing their roles even when you are plugging in new elite-level players every year.

I dunno guys. We can peck away at the specifics, but as an old boss once said to a tardy co-worker, “I’m not paying you to tell me about the goddamn traffic coming from Round Rock. Get your ass to work on time.”

 I haven’t seen anyone argue that RB hasn’t had Sweet 16 talent year in and year out. So it’s not irrational to think he should be making the Sweet 16 more often than not. Doing it only one out of the last 5 years and then copping a $200K raise is understandably gonna raise eyebrows.

But back to Scip’s point about revenue. The bread is sufficiently buttered, it seems.

“1. There must be some reason(s) that Barnes can’t keep players on campus more than a year or 2 (besides NBA money). KU, Duke, etc., seem to have no problems in that regard.”

We hear all the time that our football program (and particularly Mack Brown) should not be judged with the same criteria as say Boise State, Kansas, Missouri, etc. those schools don’t have near the tradition and money that we do. The levels of success that they expect are much lower and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Similarly, in basketball, we don’t have near the tradition of Duke, Kansas and North Carolina. We don’t have the fan support or alumni interest in the game that those schools have. So its not really fair to judge Barnes by the same criteria with which your judging Roy Williams. What Barnes’s done at Texas is very impressive. Does he need to lift the program to another level (i.e. national championship) yes, of course.

Does he deserve a raise? I tend to agree with Scipio that given our performance the past two years a raise was probably not necessary. But considering the level of talent departure we are experiencing, I highly doubt next year will provide more political cover (i.e. wins in the tourney) for Deloss to hand out a raise to Barnes. If he felt he needed to get it done to keep Barnes around, he really needed to get it done now.

I do not understand why the raise needed to be announced while the Legislature was in session. That is a failure to learn the lessons in PR101.

srr50 -
 
I dunno.
 
I understand that thinking if you want to embrace the reality of our current Idiocracy, but how exactly is it any different than any public figure getting a raise with non-taxpayer money? Should the legislature comment on an executive at Dell getting a bump? Rick isn’t a school superintendent.
 
The fact that journalists were asking the question to begin or legislators sought to opine suggests that they couldn’t bother to spend the 10 seconds of research necessary to understand the difference between a private athletics budget and taxpayer lucre. Or they have a 1st grader’s understanding of economics. Or they’re just run-of-the-mill twats.
 
Maybe as a society we should worry less about catering to the knee-jerk perception of stupid and/or lazy people and do a little educating.

I understand that thinking if you want to embrace the reality of our current Idiocracy, but how exactly is it any different than any public figure getting a raise with non-taxpayer money?

Scipio: Because this current Idiocracy is busing butchering a budget while trying to look all the while like fiscal conservatives. Because our Governor is currently trying to gut the University of Texas.

I just think this is another upset stomach for William Powers that could have been avoided.

Maybe as a society we should worry less about catering to the knee-jerk perception of stupid and/or lazy people and do a little educating.

Totally agree — I just think that is an impossible assignment when the Circus is in town.