College Football Coaching Buyouts

I hate college football. I mean, I like college football, but I hate college football. Let's go back a few years. The first football games that I attended weren't Pittsburgh Steelers games. I have no idea how expensive Steelers tickets were in the early 80s or how easy it was to get tickets, but I attended several University of Pittsburgh football games during that time. My Cub Scout troop even got group tickets once or twice. Plus, Pitt Stadium was probably about a mile from my aunt and uncle's place, so we parked in their parking lot and walked to the stadium. While I don't remember the 1976 championship season (I was 1), the team was really good in the 1980s with All-Americans Dan Marino, Bill Fralic, Hugh Green, Mark May, and Jimbo Covert. As I got older, I was fortunate to get to watch other amazing players like Ironhead Heyward, Curtis Martin, and Larry Fitzgerald. So I do like college football.

With all of that written, let's be honest here. There are 130 Division I Football Bowl Subdivision teams, and of these teams, only about 15 teams have a legitimate chance of winning a national championship each year. First, you have to be in a power-5 conference (or have a very lucrative contract with NBC) to have a chance to win. UCF has proven to be an excellent team over the past two years, yet, they haven’t been invited to the college football playoffs. Then, you need a lot money. Money to hire the best coaches and for state-of-the-art facilities to recruit the top high school players. To have all of this money, you need a massive stadium and a large donor base to support the program. While I'm probably missing a few schools, here are those that have a true chance of winning each year, according to various betting sites:

Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, USC, Florida State, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Michigan, Auburn, Penn State, and Texas. I guess you could add Stanford, UCLA, and Miami in here too. That's the list.

Now here is my problem. Each year, colleges that are not on this list fire their head football coaches and pay millions of dollars as a buyout, settlement, or per the terms of the contact.* Mike MacIntyre was fired by the University of Colorado and has $10.3 million remaining on his contract.

Texas Tech, Kansas, North Carolina, Charlotte, East Carolina, and Central Michigan are just some other schools that fired their football coaches recently. These are public institutions. Where is the money coming from? Taxpayers? Increased student fees? Here’s my new rule: If you’re not one of the 15 or so teams I mentioned, you’re not allowed to pay millions to coaches who no longer coaching at your school. I have no idea how this could be implemented, but why let details get in the way of a good and fiscally reasonable idea!


* The Louisville Courier Journal published a story in October 2018 showing that fired coaches in 2017 got over $70 million in buyouts.

Pittsburgh Athletes Invade Northern Virginia

We all know that there are a lot of Western Pennsylvania transplants and Pittsburgh sports fans in the DC area. I've written about this countless times when attending Pirates-Nationals games, Pens-Caps games, Pitt-Georgetown games, and in particular, the 2008 Steelers-Redskins game. Therefore, it should be no surprise that there's a sports memorabilia show occurring at the Dulles Expo Center this weekend (April 8-10) featuring more Pittsburgh athletes than Washington figures. Here are some of the former or current athletes with Pittsburgh area ties:

Le'Veon Bell
Terry Bradshaw
Antonio Brown (shouldn't he be in LA dancing?)
Dermontti Dawson
Kevin Greene
Lou Holtz (East Liverpool in the house!)
Curtis Martin (he's wearing Jets gear in the picture, but we all know he's a Pitt and Allderdice guy)
Heath Miller (I'd love to see if people go up to him and yell "Heeeeeeeeeath.")
Ryan Shazier
Stephon Tuitt
Markus Wheaton
Dion Lewis (another Pitt guy)
Michael Moorer (the pride of Monessen)
Dwight Stone

There is a lot of money to be made by the athletes and I assume by the event organizer. It costs $100 to get an 8x10 photo with Antonio Brown. While I don't think it's possible for Brown to take a bad picture, I wouldn't want to pay $80 for a picture with Kevin Greene if he looks like unhappy.

My question is why are there so few baseball, basketball and hockey players? Actually, there are no hockey players and the only baseball players are Juan Marichal, Dale Murphy, Gaylord Perry, Frank Robinson and Pedro Sierra compared to dozens of football players. Oh, and William Shatner will be there for some reason.

You'll notice that I didn't include the actual name of the event or a website link since I'm not necessarily promoting this event. If the company wants me to promote the event, I'm more than happy to do so...for the right price.

TMI Thursday: Youthful Indiscretion

Many people make mistakes when they are young. You just hope that your mistake doesn’t end up hurting yourself or someone else. You hope that your mistake doesn’t end up with you in jail. You also hope that the mistake is forgotten and doesn’t come back to haunt you. Finally, you hope that there is no visual evidence.

As a senior in high school, I did something that I regret. All I can say is that I was young, but that’s not really an excuse. I was 17 or 18, so I really should have known better. I had actually forgotten about this whole ordeal until I found a picture of me when I was back at my parents’ house in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but here is the reveal: I bought and wore a New York Jets hat. The horror!



My theory is that I wanted to have a hat that was different than anyone else at school. Maybe I had a soft spot for Al Toon, Browning Nagle, Freeman McNeil or a reserve tight end named Ken Whisenhunt. (I looked up the team's 1992 roster and found that the current Arizona Cardinals coach was on the team.) Maybe I bought the hat in homage to Joe Namath, a native of Beaver Falls, PA like my dad. Actually, I think that I just liked the hat.

I am a die-hard Pittsburgh Steelers fan and a member of the DC Steeler Nation. I have no ties to the Jets other than the fact that they had Curtis Martin, a fellow Pittsburgher, in recent years. I don't have the hat anymore and will never wear any type of Jets paraphernalia again. I hope that you will forgive me and not think of me any differently.


As always, make sure to visit LiLu for more TMI Thursdays. Plus, you can click here to see all of my TMI Thursday archives.