Pitt Athletic Director Heather Lyke has had a hell of a first year. From managing to get rid of Stallings and hiring Jeff Capel to save the men’s basketball program. To all the new coaching hires. I mean the turnover has been astounding — and frankly needed. Couple that with her plans for the facilities, and Lyke has gone from a “okay” hire to a home run.

And just like a coach that blows away expectations in their first year, a new contract for AD Lyke was done.

Lyke was hired in March, 2017, to replace Scott Barnes, who spent less than two years as Pitt’s athletic director before leaving in December, 2016, to take the same job at Oregon State. In 13 months, Lyke has put her brand on the program by hiring six coaches.

Evidenced by two contract extensions for Narduzzi, Gallagher clearly wants more continuity among those in leadership positions than what has occurred in the past.

“He felt things were going in the right direction and the right trajectory,” Lyke said.

Gallagher said in a statement that Lyke is “leading an ambitious charge to transform Pitt Athletics.”

“Her success here is just beginning. I am thrilled that she will continue to push our athletics programs to new heights — and spur positive change for our student-athletes and our university community — for years to come.”

Asked what the extension means to her personally, Lyke said, “It means I get to be in Pittsburgh for the next six years, for sure, and hopefully longer.”

“I really appreciate (Gallagher’s) leadership, his vision for our university and certainly his support for what we want to accomplish in the athletic department. We could have all the great ideas and all the vision that we ever want, but if you don’t have the support from the top and the leadership there, it doesn’t go a lot of places.”

What I was thinking about in the extension was how contracts for college coaches and administrators have changed.

While the nature of coaches (and ADs) being able to simply walk away from a job for another. With nothing more then a buyout (if that), there has been a bit of an absurdity. It seems one-way for the employee to take advantage. But the thing that is changing is that the contracts now have a lot more clauses that allow the school to fire “for cause.”

This story of now AD Phil Fulmer’s new contract was eye-opening.

Fulmer’s contract includes seven ways he can be fired for cause that were not included in the contract of his predecessor, John Currie.

Given the multimillion-dollar buyouts that can ensue from firing a coach or athletic director, universities like Tennessee are adding more fire-for-cause provisions to offer further protection and create more opportunity to get out from under the financial burden of buyouts if an employee is fired.
…
Two of the new provisions in Fulmer’s contract pertain to areas of Title IX law, which requires universities to protect students from sexual violence, harassment and discrimination.

Fulmer’s contract states that failure to cooperate reasonably with UT’s efforts to prevent sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence or stalking is grounds for firing for cause, as is a violation by Fulmer of UTK’s policy on sexual misconduct, relationship violence, stalking and retaliation.
…
“You’re going to see contracts more and more — especially in this day and age — really cover the harassment, treatment of women, those types of things,” [B. David Ridpath, an associate professor of sports administration at Ohio University] Ridpath said. “And, again, universities have to try to protect themselves a little bit better on these buyouts. If somebody deserves to be fired and they have broken what would get anybody else fired for cause, these contracts need to be a little bit more ironclad.”

Martin Greenberg, a Marquette University Law School professor and a sports attorney who has represented several college coaches, dubbed such Title IX contract provisions as “Baylor clauses.”
…
Unlike Currie’s contract, Fulmer’s contract also lists that he can be fired for cause if:

• He directly or indirectly sells complimentary tickets or admissions that are provided to him in his contract

• He doesn’t obtain prior approval for compensated outside activities, as outlined by his contract, or violates the conditions imposed by the chancellor concerning such activities

• He violates university rules pertaining to sexual relationships

• He consumes alcohol or drugs in a manner that impairs his ability to do his job

• UT determines any reason sufficient under Tennessee law to terminate an employment contract

“To discharge an employee before the contractual term of employment is over, under Tennessee law, an employer must justify the dismissal by showing the employee breached provisions expressed or implied,” [Chris] Anderson [a Nashville-based attorney and shareholder with Littler Mendelson, P.C., a global management-side labor and employment firm] said. “That’s why the contract set out 26 grounds under which he can be terminated by the university.”

Pitt, thanks to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s ridiculously weak sunshine laws, doesn’t have any obligation to disclose the terms of Lyke’s contract. But, I think it is reasonable to assume there are a lot of similar terms and caveats in the contract.

The additional terms for firing for cause is what UConn continues to do to avoid paying Kevin Ollie his buyout for being fired. This article lays out the whole process Ollie has to go through with UConn. Arbitration first, then to court if that fails. UConn’s biggest problem — at least as far as I can see — is that the “for cause” involves relatively minor NCAA infractions. Especially in light of the past infractions they happily supported with Jim Calhoun.

Ultimately, you have to believe that they will settle on a buyout number to make this go away. Much like Pitt did to resolve the Kevin Stallings problem. While Stallings did not have any NCAA issues, there were enough other things — admittedly minor — issues of violating his contract; that Pitt could at least use as leverage to negotiate a lower number on the buyout. Plus both sides kept the matter relatively quiet. Helped because, while Stallings has “retired” from coaching; it is not unreasonable to expect him to look for work as an analyst or such in the next year or so.

The bigger differences, though, is UConn has less money available; and they have made a lot of public, ugly accusations at Ollie. Unlike Stallings, Ollie is young and wants to coach again. His reputation has been hit by this — even if most believe UConn is using the NCAA issues as pretense. He’s going to look to get a lot closer to his full $10 million buyout then some compromise in the middle.

Search firms in coach hiring is a sore spot for Pitt fans after Stallings (and Haywood).

Believe it or not, I don’t have strong feelings about them. They serve a purpose primarily to work the back channels and gauge the interest of potential hires. Hopefully they also do a good job on the background checks. They also give administrations and the AD some cover to indicate how thorough the search was and/or to justify/rationalize the hire.

But in many cases, they seem superfluous at best. Some matches are so obvious that there is no need.

So, when I saw this tweet, it caught my attention. It had a graphic that read: Search firm hires have translated to an average head coaching tenure winning percentage of .504 compared to .469 without search firms.

Well, that is interesting. But that led me to pointing out that those winning percentages are really not that vast in reality. When you have a 30 game schedule, that would be a record of 15.12-14.88 each season versus 14.07-15.93. In other words, about one game better per year just based on that percentage. Basically 5-6 games better over a 5 year stretch.

That led to a bit of back and forth as there was an attempt to defend the numbers.

Their study is here. It provides plenty of numbers. It lacks an actual number of coaching hires by which they base the study. They just give the information that it is based on coaching changes from 2010 to 2018. It also makes clear the bias it will show from its opening graph.

Over the past nine NCAA Division I men’s basketball off-seasons, 36.7 percent of head coaching vacancies have been assisted by search firms. Among those hires include: Ohio State’s Chris Holtmann, Oregon’s Dana Altman, Texas Tech’s Chris Beard, NC State’s Kevin Keatts, and Oklahoma’s Lon Kruger, among others.

When you are citing successful hires only by search firms there is a hint.

I mean, there is some useful stuff here. Unsurprisingly, power conferences are much more likely to use search firms to hire coaches then non-power conferences. But that further points out how the numbers can be rather meaningless.

Power-Six programs that have hired search firms since 2010 have recorded an average head coaching tenure winning percentage of .525 while Power-Six programs that chose not to hire search firms have recorded an average tenure winning percentage of .519. Moving over to the non-Power-Six side, the difference in average head coaching tenure winning percentage between firm and non-firm hires is .495 compared to .462. Overall, search firm hires have translated to an average head coaching tenure winning percentage of .504 compared to .469 without search firms.

Really? A .525 winning percentage over a 30 game schedule is 15.75. .519 comes out to 15.57. If anything, that points to a certain uselessness for search firms impact in major basketball conferences.

I mean, this “study” annoys the daylights out of me every time I look at it. Even on the non-power conference side, there is problem with the percentages. Power conference programs can afford to schedule bad teams and puff their non-con (and the coaches) record. Non-power conference programs don’t have that luxury in the non-con. And many have to be the patsy team helps pad the records for power programs.

I guess, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that Athletic Director U has Parker Executive Search as one of its partners. Honestly, if I had seen that first, I probably would have spared myself the annoyance.