Hog Calls

Extending Bielema only option for UA

Arkansas head coach Bret Bielema argues a call during the second quarter of an NCAA college football game against Missouri Friday, Nov. 28, 2014, in Columbia, Mo. Missouri won 21-14. (AP Photo/L.G. Patterson)
Arkansas head coach Bret Bielema argues a call during the second quarter of an NCAA college football game against Missouri Friday, Nov. 28, 2014, in Columbia, Mo. Missouri won 21-14. (AP Photo/L.G. Patterson)

FAYETTEVILLE -- An old college football axiom asserts you can't pay a good coach too much nor pay a bad one too little.

Thus the SEC must abound with great football coaches. Because at every public university in the SEC, the head football coach there is a multi-millionaire.

As the SEC's only private school, Vanderbilt University is the lone SEC member not required to make its salaries public.

We know the others are multi-millionaires. The University of Arkansas' Bret Bielema and Mississippi State University's Dan Mullen were ranked 12th and 13th in the 14-team league with $3.2 and $3 million per year contracts.

The UA announced Bielema's extension Saturday. Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long extended Bielema's contract through 2020 at $4 million effective this year. Annual $100,000 raises forthcoming will peak Bielema's salary at $4.5 million in 2020.

Is Bielema overpaid?

By the standards most deem a professional norm, absolutely. Particularly so, one would imagine, if you we were a UA professor knowing your most basic essential university function of teaching plays a financial fiddle not remotely in tune with the frills of someone coaching.

However. Bielema's profession isn't the norm. There is nothing normal about a state university position paid for not by the state but by the private donations of alums and fans funneled by the Razorback Foundation to the athletic department. Bielema's position is also paid for through the gate receipts primarily raised by football and men's basketball and the various broadcast contracts and such via the UA and the SEC.

On that score, the economic and attention benefits that Bielema brings to the UA far exceeds the $4 million paid.

Bielema's persistence in raising both athletically and academically a program he inherited in December 2012 after the Bobby Petrino scandal and firing in April 2012, and the program's crash and burn during John L. Smith's interim coaching stint in the fall of 2012, deserves Long kudos for paying Bielema the SEC's upwardly market price.

An Arkansas "improvement" to 7-6 might sound unworthy.

However, given the 3-9 struggles of the 2013 Hogs versus the competitiveness of the 2014 Hogs against arguably the nation's toughest schedule, while off the field vastly improving academically and with a minimum of behavioral issues, the program improves to the UA's considerable benefit.

So from here the issue isn't Bielema's expanding salary but that what is demanded of him expands with it.

Whether availability for fans, media, Razorback Clubs, and above all recruiting, a coach's responsibility should increase with his increased pay.

That's the part so many universities have backwards. The greater the pay received, the greater the power a coach may fancy himself to have and the less beholden he may feel to those footing the bill.

Example: the more Petrino won on the field and the more he was paid the more entitled he deemed himself off the field until crossing a line that finally none could ignore.

On all fronts so far, Bielema seems conducting himself like a coach whose responsibilities won't slacken as his pay increases.

Sports on 02/09/2015

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