Jesus Creed
The University of Illinois paid fired football coach Ron Zook $1.3 million while he spent a year trying a new career in banking and working on his water-skiing in Florida.
The University of California paid Jeff Tedford $1.8 million while he took a year off and vacationed in New Zealand.
The University of Maryland paid Ralph Friedgen $2 million while he tried out retirement, played a lot of golf and cruised the South Carolina coastline in his 24-foot whaler, “Fishing with the Fridge.”
These are just a few examples of the golden parachutes that await newly unemployed coaches in the lucrative world of major college sports, a phenomenon recently retired football coach Steve Spurrier once called “hitting that lottery ticket.” Severance pay is the top-rising expense for athletic departments at some of America’s largest public universities, according to a Washington Post review of thousands of pages of financial records from schools in the five wealthiest conferences in college sports.
In a decade, the total annual amount spent on severance by athletic departments at 48 public universities in the “Power Five” conferences increased from $12.9 million combined in 2004, adjusted for inflation, to $28.5 million in 2014. That 120 percent jump outpaced rises on larger athletic budget items such as facilities spending (89 percent), coaches pay (85 percent) and administrative staff pay (69 percent).
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