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Why Does UT’s $34 Million Head Coach Need a “Special Assistant”?


Jonnyeagle

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In what bizarre world should former TCU coach Gary Patterson be a “special assistant” to current Texas coach Steve Sarkisian? Sarkisian should be fetching coffee and breakfast tacos for Patterson, and if he’s smart, that’s exactly what Sark will be doing over the next few months, as Patterson offers advice on cleaning up the mess the Longhorns have become.

Dysfunction has been the state of affairs for football at the University of Texas for most of the past dozen years. Forget the University of Georgia and its shiny new national championship trophy. Pay no attention to Jimbo Fisher and all those five-star recruits he’s brought to Texas A&M. Alabama? When losing the national championship game qualifies as a catastrophe, you’re disqualified from this conversation.

When it comes to sheer rubbernecking entertainment value, the Longhorns are lapping the field. In this latest installment of the saga, Patterson has agreed to join the Longhorns as a special assistant to Sarkisian, the head football coach. In reality, Patterson is being asked to save UT athletic director Chris Del Conte’s butt.

Around this time last year, Del Conte, who worked with Patterson when both were at TCU, finished a $79 million transaction in which he fired Tom Herman and replaced him with Sarkisian, then an Alabama assistant coach. (For those counting at home, that’s about $24 million to buy out Herman and his coaching staff, plus Sarkisian’s six-year, $34.2 million deal, plus around $21 million in total salary for Sark’s assistants.)
 
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This is all about what titles they can or ant use and the limitations on the number of coaches by the NCAA.

Much like Bama, they are just using their deep pockets to build a staff to automate more and more of the "other" stuff the HC at most programs do and let their HC focus more time on he is good at.  This is something from Saban and in a way I am concerned about what this does to the availability of HC talent at the G5 level.

Saban's genius is he knows what he isnt great at/doesn't want to do and delegates to proven former HCs that failed at other locations.  So now those guys can either go analyst at the big P5 schools instead of back into the G5 ranks.

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8 hours ago, greenjoe said:

Be careful about that “their own level of play.”  North Texas and others will be relegated to the modern version of “Division 1-A.”

That would be just fine. Nobody cares about us except our fans anyway, just like it is for every other non-power school. 

If a school won't play you in a series because of stadium size, history, budget, etc...they don't need to be playing each other, period. Texas and North Texas have nothing in common, athletically. Tennessee and Middle Tennessee don't either. Same with Alabama and South Alabama or LSU and ULM. 

Again, the G5 level of football is the only level of football that doesn't give a team in it the chance to win a championship for that level of play. That's all due to the idea of making money off body bag games to pay for sports that the school cannot afford. If Title IX didn't include football, as it shouldn't, then this wouldn't be so bad. But when money is involved, fairness and equality go out the door in college football.

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19 hours ago, Cr1028 said:

$79 million like it is pocket change. Some programs are just money pits. It would be nice for Wren to have that level of cash to blow.

Exactly right.  I would like to know the number of multi-multi millionaires and billionaires that are Texas Alumni and think nothing of "donating" money to UT Athletics.  Joe Jamail is one example. Anyone old enough to remember this:  "in 1985, Jamail represented Pennzoil, whose CEO Hugh Liedtke was Jamail's close friend,[9] in a lawsuit against Texaco. Pennzoil won the case and his contingency fee was $335 million.   Hell, Jamail helped fund one of the end zone renovations at UT several years ago.  And when you read about Hugh Liedtke you'll find that he, too, was a very, very wealthy man.

Schools like UT breed money-making, wealthy people.  Doctors, Lawyers, Engineers, Scientists, PhD's, etc., that make all worth large sums of money.

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