Yahoo again: Tressel made $21.7 million at Ohio State

• Fab1b

  

  http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=ap-ohiost-tresselspay
  

  COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)—Jim Tressel made $21.7 million as Ohio State football coach over his decade-long tenure before being ousted for breaking NCAA rules, records from the publicly funded school show.
  
  Tressel earned more than $3.5 million in 2010, the year he covered up an improper benefits scandal that has led to Ohio State being forced to appear before the NCAA’s committee on infractions this Friday.
  
  The figures, released Tuesday to The Associated Press by Ohio State, show that almost a quarter of Tressel’s pay—$4.6 million—came from an exclusive deal under which Ohio State directed a portion of its exclusive deal with apparel-maker Nike to the coach.
  
  During his career with the Buckeyes, Tressel was provided football game tickets valued at $104,800, more than $10,000 in Ohio State basketball tickets and over $21,000 in bowl tickets. His contracts also called for him to receive a $200,000 signing bonus in 2003, national-championship game bonuses worth a total of $835,000 (the Buckeyes played for the BCS title after the 2002, 2006 and 2007 regular seasons) and another $155,000 in bonuses for OSU players hitting certain academic standards.
  
  In Tressel’s second season, Ohio State won the 2002 national championship— its first in 34 years.
  
  Presidents of NCAA institutions are meeting this week in Indianapolis to discuss a number of issues, including expensive coaching contracts. Kansas State president Kirk Schultz wrote on Twitter that there were “lots of concerns” about the escalation of coaching salaries.
  
  NCAA President Mark Emmert, however, was not as adamant about adjusting salaries as he was providing more scholarship money for athletes or simplifying the governing body’s expansive rule book.
  
  “I think the general issue is making sure the (university’s) resources are being deployed as effectively as they can,” Emmert said. “The marketplace for salaries is the marketplace for salaries, and everyone understands that.”
  
  Tressel’s lawyer, Gene Marsh, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
  
  By comparison to Tressel’s $3.5 million salary last year, Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee earned a raise in his base salary to $818,167 and received a $300,000 bonus.
  
  Tressel’s contracts with Ohio State, like those of many of the top collegiate football coaches, were full of perks.
  
  He was reimbursed almost $10,000 in 2008-09 for his membership and expenses at an exclusive local country club. Leased cars for the coach and his wife, Ellen, were valued at $23,000 for 2010-11. They also benefited from personal use of jets and charter flights amounting to just under $60,000 since 2005. In addition, the university paid for hundreds of dollars in cell-phone plans over his career.
  
  Tressel was forced to resign on May 30 for failing to tell his bosses at Ohio State that he had learned players were trading memorabilia for cash and tattoos, breaking NCAA rules. Tressel was required under his contract and NCAA bylaws to alert his superiors to any rules violations by his athletes.
  
  As a result, the Buckeyes have self-imposed penalties which include vacating last season’s 12-1 record plus the team’s share of the Big Ten title and going on two years of NCAA probation. The committee on infractions can accept those sanctions or can add other penalties such as bowl bans, fines and recruiting limitations.
  
  Six players were suspended for the first five games of the upcoming season, although three-year starting quarterback Terrelle Pryor gave up his final year of eligibility for the chance to play in the NFL. Another player, linebacker Dorian Bell, is no longer with the team.
  
  Former assistant coach Luke Fickell, selected to take Tressel’s place as interim head coach, is being paid around $700,000—roughly $3 million less than Tressel made a year ago. He said on Tuesday that the money is not why he took the job.
  
  “I’m not focused on that one bit,” he said. “I’ve never known what I’ve made since I probably started. You could talk to my wife if there’s any questions there. If they asked me to take this job and said they weren’t going to change your pay, we weren’t going to do anything different, I’d still do it. Maybe that sounds crazy, but that’s the way I feel about it.”
  
  Initially suspended for two games and fined $250,000 by the university last March, Tressel’s final termination package released him from having to pay any of the fine. He also was allowed to keep his benefits package and was paid more than $54,000 of base salary for the month of June.
  
  Gee, athletic director Gene Smith, Tressel and Fickell are among those expected to appear at the hearing on Friday in Indianapolis.
  
  Asked at the end of the 2010 season if he was bothered that his head football coach was being paid so much, Gee said the coach’s salary reflected his value to the university.
  
  “What we need to do is to pay people what they’re worth,” he said. “I’m the highest-paid public university president in the country and people ask me, `Does that bother you?’ I say that I hope I earn my keep every day. … You think about coaches and you think about surgeons and you think about English faculty members. These are investments and we need to pay them so that they are worthy of that investment.”
  
  Follow Rusty Miller on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/rustymillerap.

  I'm sorry but i didn't see an outline of other coaches that committed violations having their pay outlined! Not that we didn't know he made a ton of money. Hom much did ol Pete make at USC? How about Butch Davis at NC? Hell whoever the GT coach is during the 2009 season. I could go on and on!
• rydawg5

  It doesn't take a genius to ADD up the fucking salary we already knew he had. Geesh these yahoo fucks are out of control. With the exception of the Nike contract, is there anything we didn't already know? Holy shit - 21 million sounds about right it's called addition dipshits.
  
  Can I be a paid journalist and let you know how much Nick Saban has made in 3 years? I mean, I can add.. is that the qualification?
• thedynasty1998

  

  This really is ridiculous. Like we didn't know he was paid well? And honestly he was probably worth every penny with the revenue he help to generate.
• se-alum

  

  I read this on ESPN and was wondering why it was written. As a State employee, anyone can see what he made if they wanted to.
• rydawg5

  se-alum;856726 wrote:I read this on ESPN and was wondering why it was written. As a State employee, anyone can see what he made if they wanted to.

  
  but you can't assume people have calculators and can SUM up 7 years of revenue can you? We need to pay a journalist to do that.
• Fab1b

  

  All the sudden coaches pay needs to be reviewed after OSU is in trouble. Many many many others with very well paid coaches were in much more trouble long before Ohio State!! This is such a joke! How about Bruce Pearl's pay Yahoo College Basketball? Old Miami coaches? Hell the BB coach at Baylor who tried to cover up a murder??????? I don't know why I even bother with yahoo but I do, I think it is that I have used yahoo for so long I just know where to go for info but this shit is really ticking me off!
• krambman

  

  Yeah, I fail to see how writing a story summarizing 10 years of contracts that are released to the public annually is news. If there had been any shady business in his contract or in the money he was reimbursed, then I could see writing a story about it, but there isn't any of that. Compare what he made to any other top coach in the past decade and what he made was comparable (if not modest). Also, if the school lost money on athletics, then I would understand there being a problem, but OSU has one of the few athletic departments in the country that is not only self-sufficient, but that also contributes money back to the academic side of the university. Why no mention of the money that he had personally donated to the hospital or library?
• Fly4Fun

  

  Correct me if I"m wrong, but Jim Tressel was at NO time ever the highest paid coach.
• sleeper

  

  A National title, BCS bowl victories, conference championships, Heisman winners, etc.. Not to mention being the #1 program in the country(10000x better than Florida, ND, Michigan) combined. He deserves it, dumb story.
• se-alum

  

  Fab1b;856737 wrote:All the sudden coaches pay needs to be reviewed after OSU is in trouble. Many many many others with very well paid coaches were in much more trouble long before Ohio State!! This is such a joke! How about Bruce Pearl's pay Yahoo College Basketball? Old Miami coaches? Hell the BB coach at Baylor who tried to cover up a murder??????? I don't know why I even bother with yahoo but I do, I think it is that I have used yahoo for so long I just know where to go for info but this shit is really ticking me off!

  
  I don't think the coaching pay issue being discussed has anything to do w/ Tress's situation. There were 5 coaches being paid more than Tressel last year.
• rydawg5

  Fly4Fun;856745 wrote:Correct me if I"m wrong, but Jim Tressel was at NO time ever the highest paid coach.

  
  I think you are right, but we shouldn't give them this much credit. You have to dismiss articles like this. Think about it. What is the point of this article? He was a coach making what the market demanded for his position. This article can be only one of two things 1) scraping for any type of story to post about OSU for views or 2) Yahoo has a communist agenda trying to show people how making money is the devil.
  
  That's the only 2 things it can be so the outrage needs to be over that and to stop this bullshit from being discussed about how much he was paid. IF he was paid 20x's what other coaches was paid, it's not a story. It might be a bad business decisions from OSU, but it's not relevent to be a story.
• Fab1b

  

  Fly4Fun;856745 wrote:Correct me if I"m wrong, but Jim Tressel was at NO time ever the highest paid coach.

  
  Correct as far as all of college football! Also I don't know this for sure and don't really want to look it up but I don't even think he was highest paid in the Big Ten when talking base salary, now endorsements are different. I could be very wrong here though if someone happens to know.
• Automatik

  

  I saw this on espn.com this morning.
  
  Riveting story bros!
• lhslep134

  

  Automatik;856757 wrote:
  Riveting story bros!

  
  Exactly haha
• ts1227

  

  Typical August story. Slow time for sports news, so they milk every last drop out of the stories out there
• WebFire

  Why exactly did OSU "release" this public info to the AP?
• Speedofsand

  

  Fab1b;856737 wrote:All the sudden coaches pay needs to be reviewed after OSU is in trouble. Many many many others with very well paid coaches were in much more trouble long before Ohio State!! This is such a joke! How about Bruce Pearl's pay Yahoo College Basketball? Old Miami coaches? Hell the BB coach at Baylor who tried to cover up a murder??????? I don't know why I even bother with yahoo but I do, I think it is that I have used yahoo for so long I just know where to go for info but this **** is really ticking me off!

  
  
• darbypitcher22

  

  JT made lots of dough... he also won lots of football games... I think there's a pretty positive correlation there don't you think?
• Fab1b

  

  Speedofsand;856892 wrote:

  
  Not at Casey LOL
• krambman

  

  WebFire;856868 wrote:Why exactly did OSU "release" this public info to the AP?

  
  Probably because the AP submitted a public records request to OSU for his contracts. I could have saved them time and told them to use Google.
• LJ

  

  WebFire;856868 wrote:Why exactly did OSU "release" this public info to the AP?

  
  A lot of his personnel file was released a little over a month ago and it had a lot of his bonuses and sponsorship info in it. That file was released because of his punishments for not reporting violations in the past.
• bo shemmy3337

  I think this is kinda funny, I mean how is this news? Its not like no one knew how much he made a year along with every other coach in the country. This is a really big reach for a story IMO.
• Writerbuckeye

  

  SMH
• se-alum

  

  Also, why didn't they mention the millions in charitable contributions that Tressel made??
• Writerbuckeye

  

  This link belongs here, too.
  
  http://www.alongtheolentangy.com/2011/8/8/2199653/deconstructing-dohrmann-or-how-to-build-a-narrative#storyjump