In a recent thread, a Ute fan went to the "you guys don't pay your coaches competitively" line. I likely would have done the same in his situation, so I don't blame him for going with that. Plus, he certainly isn't the first. Our "own" exUte finds great glee in bringing it up every few months himself.

That line is accepted as conventional wisdom by all--BYU fans and rivalry fans alike.

My question is, why? Why is this accepted?

Some of our fans are known for being..ahem...frugal, but does that mean our athletic department is? Perhaps the athletic department likes that reputation, because it helps mollify our fanbase and the "active LDS yewt fan" who love to write letters to the First Presidency whenever BYU "offends" them? Maybe the BYU athletic department has plenty of resources but it likes that fact being under the radar?

I have been following BYU sports very closely since 1996, and there has certainly never been any definitive comment on coaches' salaries that I can remember except that LaVell Edwards was underpaid, and that the Volleyball coach left because he demanded a 6 figure salary and BYU said no.

In fact, the only solid info I've ever seen on athletic budgets would tend to support the opposite conclusion of "cheap". Two or three years ago, we--along with Louisville--were the only non-BCS schools with an athletic budget over $20 million per year.

Still, that doesn't address salaries, so we are left to draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence, and I'd suggest that the anecdotal evidence is more in favor of BYU being competitive in salaries than in their being stingy.

When Gary Crowton was negotiating for the head coaching job, there were a series of negotiations going on between his agent and BYU, but GC took the job after all, didn't he? BYU did what they needed to do to get their guy.

When GC was fired...err...allowed to resign, it was reported that BYU boosters had commitments for enough money to buy out Andy Reid's contract from the Eagles if he wanted to come (at the time, it was reported that he had $16 million left on his contract). Doesn't seem like a move by a penny-pinching, cheap athletic department to me.

When BYU was deluded and thought that Twhit (Whittingham) was the way to go for a head coach, we sent yewtah back to Huntsman enough times to get Utah paying a first time coach $750,000/year. To me, that looks like not only did we have enough resources to be competitive, but we helped weaken our rival by getting them to overpay for their first year head coach.

As far as assistant coaches go, when Gary Crowton wanted to hire Bronco, New Mexico's coach complained that: 1)we were like a BCS school with our resources, and 2)he mentioned a specific figure that (I believe it was in the $100-150K range/yr, but I don't remember for sure), although GC denied in a non-denial denial (Crowton said something like, "how does he know what we pay?" and brushed it off), was certainly not cheap for an assistant.

In the other assistant coaching hires we have made, not only did we get very qualified people, but we pulled an oline coach away from a BCS school (ASU), and we pulled a secondary coach from a professional football team in the CFL. If we were cheap, I would imagine we'd be forced to pull guys from JCs or Division 2 schools who were so desperate to get into Division 1 that they'd work for anything. We have only lost one assistant coach in the last few years to another school (Brian Mitchell), and considering how bad our secondary was last year, did we really "lose" him?

Even going back a few years, when Norm Chow left, he didn't leave for peanuts--he took a salary which made him the highest paid assistant in the nation. Was NC State a bunch of morons paying 3-4 times what Chow was making before, or maybe did they make a huge offer because Chow was already making a good living at BYU?

Utah seems to have the reputation for being generous in salaries, but remember that it was BYU that hired Kufusi away from yewtah, and not the other way around. In fact, Utah has tried to hire Kufusi back at least twice, but he still continues to toil down in Provo. Is he an idiot working for under market value, or perhaps the reality is that his salary isn't that bad, after all?

In a non-football anecdote, Steve Cleveland was interviewed about his first months at Fresno, and he said that he had to be strategic about recruiting to make sure his recruiting budget was used in an effective way. He then said, "...at BYU I had a [recruiting] budget, but I never knew what it was." Does that sound like a cheap athletic department to you?

And, by their fruits shall we know them? Look at facilities. Has BYU ever not provided the necessary facilities for their athletic programs to be competitive? Instead, they have have had such capital outlays over the last few years of:

*Indoor practice facility which has recruits raving

*Student Athlete Center that includes a brand new weight room that has recruits saying it is the best facilities they have seen bar none.

*New sports turf installed in the football practice field with no fanfare and no public fund raising effort. CSU, by comparison, installed the same thing recently, and announced it to great fanfare and did have a public fund raising effort.

*Improvements to LES both ongoing and planned which not only didn't require public fund raising, but they are actually keeping details secret.

*A brand new basketball floor at the Marriott Center with a brand new sound system

*a brand new video system that was reported to cost somewhere around $1 million for sports teams to break down tape.

...and these are just off the top of my head from 800 miles away. Both our track and field and softball teams hosted NCAA regionals this year, and there were no complaints about either facility.

I submit that instead of BYU athletics being cheap, they are, in fact, the class of the MWC, and have the resources to achieve whatever goals they set for themselves--whether it is brand new facilities, or a necessary hire. Perhaps this conventional wisdom of BYU not paying coaches will, from this post, at least be challenged, instead of being accepted blindly by one and all.