Members of the Arkansas State football team have good reason to feel abandoned by the man who led them to the school’s best season in many years, but they started preparing over the weekend for the Jan. 8 GoDaddy.com Bowl in Mobile, Ala.
The team will make the trip under interim head coach David Gunn, an assistant at ASU for the past 10 years. He was tapped after first-year coach Hugh Freeze exited to take over the floundering Ole Miss football program.
For the second straight time, Ole Miss has turned to Arkansas for a head football coach. Houston Nutt, formerly of the Arkansas Razorbacks, didn’t work out in his four-year stint so, the Rebels lured Freeze away from ASU.
All that came about after ASU completed an undefeated Sun Belt Conference season, taking the league championship outright for the first time and completing a 10-2 regular season, the school’s best since joining the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision in 1992 and its first 10-win season in 25 years. ASU had already accepted the bowl bid.
Suddenly the Red Wolves were without their head coach and four assistants who went with him immediately to start recruiting for Ole Miss. That meant the team was without its offensive coordinator (Freeze) and defensive coordinator.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
In most fields of endeavor, when a chief executive leaves an organization for another job, the executive gives at least two weeks notice and in most cases a month or more. That’s especially true when the CEO is under contract.
Like most major college head coaches, Freeze had a long-term contract with ASU. After one year as offensive coordinator under then-head coach Steve Roberts, Freeze was elevated to head coach last December when Roberts was fired and signed a three-year contract. When his team won its seventh game this fall, Freeze earned an automatic one-year extension.
Yet the contract meant little when Ole Miss came calling. Freeze made his decision between the time ASU wrapped up its season on a Saturday evening and the next Monday afternoon, when he was announced as Ole Miss’ new head coach at a press conference in Oxford.
Prior to the final game, Ole Miss officials had requested permission to contact Freeze about its vacancy and ASU athletic director Dean Lee granted the request when the season was over. Whether he had a choice is academic.
Freeze’s annual salary at ASU was the lowest in the country among FBS schools responding to a USA Today survey — a base of $151,660, with supplements and bonuses that could make it as much as $224,660. At Ole Miss he will receive a $1.5 million annual salary guaranteed over four years, and incentives could lift it as high as $2.5 million annually.
That’s a lot of money, but the truth is Freeze probably would have taken less. He’s originally from Mississippi and he’s moving closer to family. While he had great success and won over the fan base at ASU in a short time, he hadn’t really been in Jonesboro long enough to sink roots. And then along came his dream job.
He met with the Red Wolves team before departing and also left these Tweets: “To the players at Arkansas State. I LOVE EACH and EVERYONE of you. I’m sorry, I truly am. I hope that in time you will forgive me.”
“I asked for a word from God, I found Jeremiah 29:11-14. I have taken the Head Coaching Job at Ole Miss, but it’s not without a heavy heart.”
That passage in the Bible says in part: “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
In their public statements, the players have remained positive both toward the team’s future and the coach who abandoned them for a better-paying job.
We can, of course, decry the fact that major-college athletics has come to such a state that football coaches can be paid 10 times more than university presidents. That’s the reality, though.
The USA Today survey of major-college head football coaches’ salaries found that the average had jumped 55 percent since 2006 — to an average of $1.47 million. They go as high as about $6 million annually for Texas’ Mack Brown.
“The hell with gold,” higher education lawyer Sheldon Steinbach told the newspaper. “I want to buy futures in coaches’ contracts.”
We’re not going to change that, though, because the salaries can be limited only by the institutions themselves. States can cap the salaries by law for state-supported institutions, and Arkansas does. But that doesn’t keep a university from using private funds to supplement those salaries, and a law capping supplements would only put a state’s own institutions at a competitive disadvantage.
So the rich get richer.
However, the National Collegiate Athletic Association is noticeably absent from regulating coaches’ contracts, including the issue of keeping its member institutions from raiding each other before postseason play is over.
ASU will apparently get a buyout of $225,000 in return for Freeze leaving his duties without notice. Whether he has to pay it or his new employer does, that’s a fraction of what Ole Miss spends on its head football coach.
The NCAA, founded more than 100 years ago to protect student-athletes, considers its authority to be far-reaching when it comes to enforcing myriad recruiting rules and even can tell its members what mascots it can and cannot use. Why can’t it protect athletes selected for post-season honors from being robbed of their coaches for a few weeks?
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Roy Ockert Jr. is editor of The Jonesboro Sun. He can be reached at royo@jonesborosun.com.