In 1997 Ole Miss athletic director Pete Boone came up with a scheme to offer head football coach Tommy Tuberville a 10-year contract. The athletic foundation would fund and guarantee the contract to get around the state’s four-year employment contract limit.
When Chancellor Robert Khayat pitched it to the IHL board a number of us on the committee considering the request expressed concerns. First, the scheme would violate the state constitution four-year limit on IHL contracts. Second, it would set a bad precedent resulting in a slew of long-term coach and athletic director contracts, something we saw as bad business practice. We also voiced concerns about institutional control and university liability. The Chancellor withdrew the request. Pete left perturbed. And the next year Tuberville abandoned Ole Miss for Auburn.
Twenty-five years later it appears the IHL Board may allow a similar scheme to keep another coach away from Auburn.
While the details of Lane Kiffin’s contract have not yet been made public, Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger reported it would have a six-year base and get around the four-year limit by running the contract through Ole Miss’s private athletics foundation. Another report had the contract length at eight years and funded through “a private foundation.”
While athletic foundations may pay most or all of football coaches’ salaries, they do not employ coaches. The universities do. When I served on the IHL Board in the 1990s we required athletic foundation funds to pass through the universities to the coaches, i.e., no direct payments to coaches. That made it abundantly clear that coaches were university employees and subject institutional control.
While news reports cited state law as the issue with contract limits, it’s actually the state constitution. Section 213-A reads in part: “Such board shall have the power and authority to elect the heads of the various institutions of higher learning, and contract with all deans, professors and other members of the teaching staff, and all administrative employees of said institutions for a term not exceeding four (4) years.”
State law and IHL Board policy both simply repeat the constitutional provision.
The Legislature could have removed the four-year limit, but hasn’t. In 2018, State Sen. Josh Harkins got the Senate to pass Concurrent Resolution 547 to delete the four-year limit language. However, the resolution died in the House.
Just weeks ago Ole Miss Vice Chancellor for Intercollegiate Athletics Keith Carter told the North Jackson Rotary Club the four-year limit on coaching contracts was a good thing. Mississippi universities have been able to roll over four-year contracts annually for good coaches, but avoid lengthy payouts when choosing to fire bad coaches.
If the IHL Board has now decided to wink and nod at the constitution and allow athletic foundations to contract with coaches for longer terms, it will have significant consequences. Next up will be academic foundations offering long-term contracts to presidents et al.
Got to keep them from moving to Auburn too.
“A person is praised according to their prudence” – Proverbs 12:8.
Crawford is a syndicated columnist from Jackson.
