Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
One of Mel Brooks’ characters through time in History of The World Part I is a king leading up to his unfortunate days when the citizens of France come for his head in the late 18th Century.
While he is enjoying the privileges of a live human chess match and having a boy with a bucket to manage his bio break, he states, “it’s good to be the king.”
Indiana University head football coach Curt Cignetti is the darling of the state this season, and he is now the highest paid state employee ever. He’ll find it’s even better to be the king than it already was in Bloomington.
Cignetti is now making Urban Meyer, Ryan Day, Nick Saban, James Franklin money.
Base salary is a modest $500,000 (still the highest padi state employee, though), but it’s the incentives that will guarantee him a steady income of at least $11 million for the next eight calendar years.
The terms of Cignetti’s contract also include a buyout, but what coaching contract doesn’t these days?
Hats off to IU because they did not get Shanghaied into the buyout deal James Franklin – recently fired in midseason by Penn State – will be paid… generational wealth totaling $50 million.
Cignetti’s buyout is not as vulgar as Franklin’s was, but it goes to show you, if you can bring success to a Power Four college football program, you, your children, and even your grandchildren are set for life.
Penn State’s business partner, adidas, on the other hand, bailed out the university by chipping in, covering the aforementioned buyout balance.
James Franklin has a lot of coaching years left in him, and even with all that money he still has plenty of fuel for his coaching fire.
College football head coaches are CEOs these days, working with their athletic departments to manage name, image, likeness (NIL), actual payments to players, recruiting, and monitoring/harvesting the transfer portal.
Franklin’s buyout made me sick for a little while until my uncle and I were on one of our weekly Sunday morning phone calls talking about C-suite severances and buyouts.
My uncle was Borders’ last compensation and benefits manager, and one of the very last to leave the company due to the nature of his work required to the very end. He shared some eye-opening buyouts among other major corporations where execs leaving those outfits didn’t have success close to the levels Franklin had before his team’s four-game September-October implosion.
Many of you work for companies in the Lake City where, either in need to know or by conjecture, you’ve probably experienced some throat vomiting when you learned of their buyouts and/or severances.
These packages seem sometimes seem even more vulgar than the bonus structures.
Trust me, there’s a comp and benefits person aboard these companies, or even an attorney, who can help the rest of us understand why these packages are justified whether they shed light on the matter or still make us wretch.
They will explain some values they’ve quantified based on investors, loaning institutions, and vendors who will make decisions on the company’s fate based on who is behind the wheel.
Cignetti, who can now begin to afford numerous creature comforts out of his own wallet as his new pay rate kicks in, will get some of those comped. These include $25,000 annual paid expenses for car services, and paid membership to a prestigious golf club.
With this said, the perquisite that is surprisingly understandable is the car service he’s furnished while employed by the state and the university.
Anyone who has tried to find a parking spot during daytime hours on a Big Ten school’s campus knows that there is worthwhile convenience of having a car pick you up and drop you off (or do that for others as you deem necessary). Non-gameday campus activity – the time filled with classes in session – is a pain in the tukus when you must find adequate parking or get others around who do not have a designated spot to park like the head coach does.
This week, Curt Cignetti will steadily learn and appreciate it’s even better than good to be the king.
