Snip the UW’s Golden Parachutes

There’s the world you and I live in. Then there’s the universe occupied by Luke Fickell, Chris McIntosh and Jennifer Mnookin.

That trio is enjoying a lazy cruise down the River D’Nile. Fickell has solidified the growing notion that he wasn’t the right guy to lead the Badger football program. McIntosh, the UW Athletic Director who hired Fickell, refuses to see what’s plainly in front of him — Fickell’s teams make a plethora of basic mistakes that betray bad coaching and they’re not getting any better. And Chancellor Mnookin, who gave McIntosh a new contract, a raise and a richer buyout soon after Fickell’s first dismal season, issued a statement in support of McIntosh after the team’s latest dispiriting loss, this time to that powerhouse program, the Maryland Terrapins. Yes, the Badgers got creamed by a team whose mascot is a turtle.

All of this starts and ends with money. McIntosh can’t afford to fire Fickell because under his contract he’d be owed $29 million just to walk away. Mnookin can’t afford to fire McIntosh because, under the terms of the new contract she gave him, he’d be owed, by my rough estimate, $3.4 million, again just to leave a job he’s failed at.

And, to add insult to injury, both Fickell and McIntosh get automatic pay increases every year regardless of how the team performs. Fickell gets an automatic increase of $100,000 while McIntosh gets $50,000. Both are running the program into the ground, but it doesn’t matter. And by the way, Mnookin gets a similar automatic annual increase, though in her case it’s called a retention bonus and it’s allegedly tied to her performance. This year she’ll get $150,000 and that ratchets up to $350,000 in a few years.

Part of me asks why we should care. Unless there’s some creative accounting going on (and I wouldn’t assume there isn’t), the UW athletic program is not subsidized by taxpayers. Football’s revenues, supplemented by men’s basketball, pay for themselves as well as for all of the other non-revenue sports. Of course, if the take from football drops off, that — combined with new budget pressures created by the need to finally pay players what they’re worth — could mean the demise of sports that don’t make money. But I can’t say I care if the UW has a track, softball or gymnastics team.

And, of course, you could make a pretty good argument that the whole UW athletic program could go away or go down to a lower division and, not only would the world not come to an end, but the university might be better off for it. Harvard, Princeton and Yale still do pretty well without competing for national football titles. What big time team sports have to do with the mission of a major research university has never been clear to me.

That said, I’m enough of a Badger fan to want the team to win some games. And it galls the heck out of me that a coach can fail as badly as Fickell has and there’s no accountability. In fact, he needs to be paid extravagantly just to leave and get out of the way. Same goes for McIntosh. He staked his career on his bold moves to fire a successful coach in Paul Chryst, pass over another popular choice in Jim Leonhard and pay Fickell a fortune to come to Wisconsin. It was a series of gutsy moves. But they failed, and spectacularly. And yet McIntosh doesn’t have to be held accountable. Like Fickell, if fired he’ll walk away with a big pay day.

The bigger problem here is the lack of moral hazard. Systems don’t work when the people with the power never have to pay the price for their failures. That’s true for the corner office occupants in corporate America as well. The only people who have their compensation based on performance and find themselves out on the street without a dime in severance if they do a bad job — or even do a good job but get laid off because the CEO ran the place into the turf — are the front line workers. In other words, about 95% of us. We’ve got a free market system for workers and socialism for the people at the top.

So, when they finally get around to firing Fickell and McIntosh, what should the UW do? Cut the golden parachutes and the automatic pay increases. You get a boost based purely on your performance and if you fail, you lose your job, period. Just like everybody else.

Now, you may argue that that’s unrealistic because you need to pay all this money and have these obscenely rich buyouts to attract the best coaches. I have one devastating response to that argument: his name is Luke Fickell.