Whither Mike Schafer?

[atb9]

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

 Mark Mazzolini at Harvard was making an estimated $100K last year when he decamped for the Green Bay Gamblers.

The hockey coach's job at Cornell is endowed but you'd only be guessing at the salary from endowment. You could draw down 5% of a $2 million endowment and come up with $100K, but would that be for salary or salary and benefits? Or could the U feel comfortable drawing down 7%-8%?

Assistant coaches have to love the game and/or have a working spouse. [/q]

There are also Phys Ed classes and hockey camps that also figure into the equation but I have no idea what it adds up to.

[Weder]

The football offensive coordinator and women's basketball coach job postings on the CU Web site advertise pay at starting around $32K/year -- assuming they get paid year-round.

[CU at Stanford]

I think a 5% payout on Cornell's endowment is a generous estimate.  Trustees are very conserviative on this.  Harvard's payout is around 4% these days, maybe just south of 4%.  Stanford is perhaps most aggressive, at a fraction north of 5%.

Don't think the salaries of our coaches are public knowledge, as Cornell is not a wholely public institution, and the Athletics Department belongs to the private portion of CU.

[Trotsky]

Schafer will have other options.  Whether he exercises them depends in large part on how comfortable the Athletic Department and administration make him feel.  And *that* makes me a little nervous, because the Athletic Department and administration haven't got a clue.  The former is mired in second rate politics and envy, the latter is up in an ivory tower with no concept of what Schafer means to the school and the alumni.

He's staying because he loves it here.  If the morons and paper shufflers piss him off enough, he'll leave.  Just like you at your job.

[Scersk '97]

[Q]Trotsky Wrote:
Whether he exercises them depends in large part on how comfortable the Athletic Department and administration make him feel.  And *that* makes me a little nervous, because the Athletic Department...  is mired in second rate politics and envy...[/q]

My simple equation:

Andy Noel = ::asshole::

[Mike Nevin]

For comparison sake -- I thought I saw that the ND head coach was getting a contract worth somewhere around $400k/yr after they won their national championship a few years back.  I can't remember where I saw that-- USCHO ? , but I am pretty sure that is the amount, because I definitely remember it being a very surprising amount of cash for a hockey coach.  

I really hope Schafer loves it here.  I hope he stays convinced that he can win a national championship here.  And, I hope he can do it.  But if it doesn't happen in a few years, I could see him going to one of the non-ECAC perennial contenders, where the road to the national championship is a little easier.  I think there are only a handful of college jobs that would be a step up from coaching at Cornell,  but if he gets frustrated here, and he wants a national championship, I could see him going somewhere.

[Mike Nevin]

 [Q] For comparison sake -- I thought I saw that the ND head coach was getting a contract worth somewhere around $400k/yr after they won their national championship a few years back. I can't remember where I saw that-- USCHO ? , but I am pretty sure that is the amount, because I definitely remember it being a very surprising amount of cash for a hockey coach. [/Q]

-- Actually, it was only topping out at 200k/yr in 2008/2009 if he stayed.  Sorry.
Mike

[atb9]

[Q]Mike Nevin Wrote:

 For comparison sake -- I thought I saw that the ND head coach was getting a contract worth somewhere around $400k/yr after they won their national championship a few years back.  I can't remember where I saw that-- USCHO ? , but I am pretty sure that is the amount, because I definitely remember it being a very surprising amount of cash for a hockey coach.   [/q]

Also for comparison sake, NoDak has a stadium with leather seats.   ::nut:: :-P

Hakstol has got to be the highest paid college hockey coach and I'm sure they made the figure public because of that reason.

[billhoward]

The effect of everyone knowing everyone else's salary is it leads to salary creep. Proabably it's gone overboard in the NBA, MLB, NHL and among the 25 top D1 basketball coaches. I think it's not going to hurt college hockey anytime soon.

Schafer is one of America's ten best hockey coaches (five?) and he makes what? Peanuts compared to what one of the nation's ten best history profs makes. Probably he has to weigh the pressure of recruiting and practice against a very nice off-season family lifestyle in Ithaca (at least on days when daddy can come home for dinner). Cornell pays medical, it has (?) a decent retirement plan, and does it put your kids through Cornell for free or not any more (?) if they get in. But still you're left with that feeling that a guy near the pinnacle of his chosen profession is not going to be looking at an Audi A8 as his next car.

Question: The coach at North Dakota makes $200K a year. What in heck in North Dakota can you spend it on, unless you want to pay cash for a big granite cliff and have someone carve pictures on it?

[Al DeFlorio]

[Q]atb9 Wrote:

 [Q2]Mike Nevin Wrote:

 For comparison sake -- I thought I saw that the ND head coach was getting a contract worth somewhere around $400k/yr after they won their national championship a few years back.  I can't remember where I saw that-- USCHO ? , but I am pretty sure that is the amount, because I definitely remember it being a very surprising amount of cash for a hockey coach.   [/Q]
Also for comparison sake, NoDak has a stadium with leather seats.    

Hakstol has got to be the highest paid college hockey coach and I'm sure they made the figure public because of that reason.[/q]
I'll bet Parker and York make some pretty big bucks.  Jackie-boy turned down offers from the Bruins in both 1991 and 1997.

Interesting five-year-old USCHO article on Parker here, by the way:

http://www.uscho.com/news/2000/02/14_000572.php

Favorite Parker quote for "vintage" ECAC fans:

"I always thought that the ECAC hockey league of old was the best hockey league you could play in because there were 17 teams in the league and only eight of them made the playoffs," says Parker. "So the whole regular season was unbelievably competitive. And when you made the playoffs, it was single elimination all the way through."

And another:

"The ECAC championship was a premier event. Nobody was drawing like the ECAC was drawing. We'd go to the ECAC championship at the Boston Garden and we'd have 13,909 [a sellout]. Then we'd go to the national championship the next week in front of sometimes 2,000 people.

"When I was a junior, for example, we played Cornell in the ECAC final. They had Kenny Dryden and a great team and we had Herb Wakabayashi and a great team. We were the two premier teams in the nation actually.

"It was absolutely mobbed. You couldn't get a ticket. It was one of the biggest crowds they ever had at the Garden, including Celtics playoffs or Bruins. From '65 on, the Friday night ECAC semifinal round was the hottest ticket in college hockey."

[billhoward]

Parker is amazing to have survived three decades in the pressure cooker at BU. When he was a young coach he always seemed on the verge of self-induced ulcers. Maybe the new place should be called Agganis Rink at the Tagamet Center.

Does Hockey East fill the Garden now? You're right that the ECAC tourneys were incredible before the ECAC-HE breakup and you knew if you won the ECACs you were in the NCAAs and you had a 25% chance (statistically) of coming out the national champion since only four teams played and typically two were ECAC.

(The other thing a university *could* do is have a hotshot Wall Street alum (even BU has some of them, even BC does even if Larry Summers says it's unusual to see Catholics on Wall Street) as his non-financial conribution to the U personally take care of Jackie's or Jerry's (or Mike's?) investments and make sure he gets in at the head of the line for safe IPOs (oxymoron?) or at least into seeming sure-fire funds. Maybe the coach's big worry is not living on $100K now at 40 but having something go wrong coaching-wise and being out of hockey coaching and just about broke at 50 when his kids are heading off to college.)

[nyiballs]

I'm sorry, but I'm not as much on the Schafer bandwagon as everyone else.  He reminds me of Tony Dungy in football.  Great knowledge, great preparation, can take a team one step from the top, but is just unable to get them over the hump.

2003 we had the best team in the country, this year we had the best team in the regional, I will not condemn him just yet, but without a frozen four at least next year, I will be fairly convinced that Schafer is not the one to lead Cornell to its next championship.

[KeithK]

[Q]nyiballs Wrote:

 I'm sorry, but I'm not as much on the Schafer bandwagon as everyone else.  He reminds me of Tony Dungy in football.  Great knowledge, great preparation, can take a team one step from the top, but is just unable to get them over the hump.

2003 we had the best team in the country, this year we had the best team in the regional, I will not condemn him just yet, but without a frozen four at least next year, I will be fairly convinced that Schafer is not the one to lead Cornell to its next championship.[/q]Naturally.  Because there are lots of other coaches out there who have a track record of taking a no-scholarship ECAC team to a national championship.  If Schafer doesn't win it all next year we can just go out and get one of them.

[CUlater 89]

[Q]KeithK Wrote:

 [Q2]nyiballs Wrote:

 I'm sorry, but I'm not as much on the Schafer bandwagon as everyone else.  He reminds me of Tony Dungy in football.  Great knowledge, great preparation, can take a team one step from the top, but is just unable to get them over the hump.

2003 we had the best team in the country, this year we had the best team in the regional, I will not condemn him just yet, but without a frozen four at least next year, I will be fairly convinced that Schafer is not the one to lead Cornell to its next championship.[/Q]
Naturally.  Because there are lots of other coaches out there who have a track record of taking a no-scholarship ECAC team to a national championship.  If Schafer doesn't win it all next year we can just go out and get one of them.[/q]

I think you missed his point.  Look at Dean Smith; he put together great squads, some with more heart than others and some with more talent, but until he won the NCAA title in 1982 (and even after that title), many openly doubted his ability to get a team over the hump.  Same thing for Roy Williams now.  That doesn't mean they're not great coaches or should be fired.  Schafer's "problem" is that he appears to have made the program a perennial top 15 squad, or even a perennial NCAA playoff team.  There's not much more to do other than win the title.

[billhoward]

Legends are made and lost based on the butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo and the wind currents making the slapshot clang off the post and out of, not into, the net, for what would have been the tying goal. It's all so random that it's unfair to say a team or a coach is a success / failure based on the outcome of one game or one season. The 1990s book "Accidental Millionaires" ticked off a lot of people in Silicon Valley because it said their fortunes were due to quirks of timing as much as sheer technical or entrepreneurial genius.