Stylish Urban Living

“A ver­bal con­tract isn’t worth the paper it’s writ­ten on.”

— Samuel Goldwyn

“He who derives the advan­tage ought to sus­tain the burden.”

— Legal maxim

Sev­eral years ago, when The Ohio State Uni­ver­sity gave a new con­tract to then head foot­ball coach Jim Tres­sel, Case Study exam­ined the terms of the coach’s con­tract. With Tres­sel now work­ing as a game day con­sul­tant for the win­less Indi­anapo­lis Colts (and rumored to be under con­sid­er­a­tion to coach at UCLA), it seems only fair to give the same scrutiny to the con­tract signed by new head coach Urban Meyer.

The agree­ment, signed on Nov. 28, con­tains all the com­mon con­trac­tual ele­ments. Like most con­tracts, rather than repeat the names of the par­ties over and over again, it quickly iden­ti­fies short­cuts, label­ing Meyer, “Coach” and the uni­ver­sity, “Ohio State.” The con­tract fur­ther notes that it is lay­ing out finan­cial terms and will address “addi­tional terms of employ­ment” in another document.

There is one glar­ing dif­fer­ence from the con­tract given to Tres­sel. That deal, signed in 2006, spec­i­fied that the coach was to report to the ath­letic direc­tor directly and was only nom­i­nally under the con­trol of the uni­ver­sity pres­i­dent. Meyer’s con­tract con­tains not a sin­gle men­tion of the ath­letic direc­tor posi­tion, nei­ther does it lay out any alter­na­tive report­ing sys­tem. This may relate to the ques­tions of ade­quate super­vi­sion over the foot­ball pro­gram that have arisen as a result of ongo­ing NCAA inves­ti­ga­tions or may sim­ply be because this term sheet does not address report­ing conditions.

Like most con­tracts, Meyer’s term sheet spec­i­fies its length (through Jan. 31, 2018), and how the agree­ment will be ter­mi­nated. Most inter­est­ing though, is Meyer’s com­pen­sa­tion struc­ture. His base salary each year for coach­ing foot­ball is $700,000 — two hun­dred thou­sand more than Tres­sel was paid.

Meyer will get sig­nif­i­cantly more than Tres­sel did for apparel deals. Tressel’s apparel deal was $625,000 annu­ally. Meyer’s is more than twice that amount — $1.4 mil­lion per year. In addi­tion, Meyer will earn $1.85 mil­lion for “media, pro­mo­tions and pub­lic rela­tions.” This includes radio and tele­vi­sion pro­grams under the con­trol of the uni­ver­sity and with Ohio State con­trol­ling “title and inter­est in his name, like­ness and other indi­cia iden­ti­fied with [him].” This is nearly three times the amount that Tres­sel was paid for media relations.

Sim­i­lar to Tressel’s con­tract, Meyer will be paid a retire­ment con­tri­bu­tion ($40,000 per year), a fee to appeal at a Coca-Cola event ($10,000 per year) and reten­tion pay­ments if he remains employed beyond 2013. ($450,000 in 2014, $750,000 in 2016 and $1.2 mil­lion in 2018). He will also earn a “tran­si­tion pay­ment” of $250,000. Like his pre­de­ces­sor, Meyer can also earn bonuses. These can kick in based on the foot­ball team’s ‘grad­u­a­tion suc­cess rate’ and ‘aca­d­e­mic progress rate’ ($100,000-$150,000 each), for win­ning the Big Ten Lead­ers Divi­sion ($50,000), for win­ning the Big Ten Cham­pi­onship game ($100,000 plus an addi­tional con­tract year), for mak­ing a BCS bowl game ($150,000) and for mak­ing the BCS national cham­pi­onship game ($250,000).

Meyer also gets an auto­mo­bile stipend; 12 tick­ets, five press passes and two park­ing passes to every home foot­ball game; two tick­ets to every home bas­ket­ball game; a golf club mem­ber­ship; and air­line travel expenses. In total Meyer’s guar­an­teed pay is $4,000,000. If the Buck­eyes met all aca­d­e­mic bonuses, won a Big Ten cham­pi­onship and made the national cham­pi­onship game, that amount would rise to $4,700,000.

At the press con­fer­ence announc­ing his hir­ing, Meyer stated that part of the rea­son he left Florida was that he was try­ing to fix all of the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with col­lege foot­ball rather than con­cen­trat­ing on his job. The final para­graph of his term sheet pro­vides that Ohio State will found the ‘Urban Meyer Fel­low­ship for Ethics and Lead­er­ship in Sports’ and that Meyer will both teach and work to secure future fund­ing for the fellowship.

Meyer’s ethics will cer­tainly be scru­ti­nized, con­sid­er­ing the nature in which the job became open in the first place. Hope­fully, he’ll steer clear of the eth­i­cal lapses and earn plenty of those bonuses for grad­u­a­tion rates and bowl games.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor at the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Dec 9 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.