When Jamie Dixon returned to his alma mater in 2016, TCU welcomed him with open arms and an enticing six-year contract.
His 13 years as head basketball coach at Pitt had turned sour, by some demanding tastes, and the timing for TCU couldn’t have been better.
Dixon had guided the Panthers to the NCAA tournament 11 times and his teams had appeared in the AP Top 10 in nine of those 13 seasons. TCU had only dreamed of a coach with those credentials.
Cue the band and the alma mater.
The contract was signed — signed in ink, as the people who run TCU reminded all concerned parties this week.
A deal is a deal, especially when it has an $8 million or so buyout attached.
Athletic director Jeremiah Donati said Friday that there was no negotiating of the buyout clause that would have freed Dixon to leave TCU for UCLA. The TCU people had already decided that the buyout provision and its amount were neither removable nor negotiable.
Or as someone close to the discussions put it to me, “Why would we give that up?
“We’re happy he’s here. He has a really good recruiting class coming in. And we’ve put a lot of money into our basketball facilities.
“Why would we give that up?”
So the coach stays. And AD Donati is happy about that.
Chancellor Victor Boschini is happy.
And Frogs fans are happy – or at least they should be.
But I asked Donati whether Dixon himself was happy, after being offered what may have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to return to his native Southern California area and coach one of the most storied basketball programs of all time.
“Anyone who knows him understands the positive impact his parents and family have had in his life and how important they are to him,” Donati said. “The fact that they live in Los Angeles gave him pause. Anyone under those circumstances would understand — I certainly did.
“He has always been upfront with me and has always told me TCU is where he wants to be.”
Don’t expect a hangover effect, Donati was saying.
“Jamie and I spent the morning in my office discussing ways to continue building the men’s basketball program together,” he said to illustrate.
Donati, always very social media savvy, punctuated the day’s developments on Twitter.
Two weeks ago he was prompted to resolve an unplanned insect infestation in the picnic pavilion area of Lupton Stadium.
When the invading rodents in burnt orange asked why their baseball tickets in the pavilion were canceled, Donati answered bluntly via Twitter:
“Because it’s our stadium.”
Somebody instantly printed T-shirts with the snappy retort.
And Friday, Donati followed with this:
Fueled by the always cynical social media mob, the rage against the UCLA athletic leadership now figures to be acutely harsh. Cheap and weak do not play well, especially among a constituency with NCAA banners coming out the wazoo.
Somehow, someone at UCLA let it slip that the Bruins had offered Kentucky’s John Calipari a six-year, $45-million deal, which he declined. And now someone at UCLA didn’t perform its due diligence to ensure that Dixon’s buyout wouldn’t be a deal-breaker?
If UCLA (a) didn’t have the cash to cover the $8 million-or-so buyout, or (b) didn’t want to pay it on general principles, why was Jamie Dixon on its list to begin with?
Jamie himself couldn’t have had any illusions about the clauses affixed to his TCU contract. When he left Pitt three years ago, TCU had to deal with a reported similar $10 million buyout clause – an extraordinary amount — on the seven years that remained on his contract with the Panthers.
Pitt’s athletic director at the time, Scott Barnes, explained that the buyout figure was “above anything” he had seen in the marketplace, and so Pitt “softened” it to allow Dixon to return to his alma mater.
“It wouldn’t have been good for our program or our student-athletes, or him and his family to hold him hostage by what was a way beyond market buyout,” Barnes told reporters.
TCU took the opposite approach, in other words. But Dixon has only been at TCU three years. He was at Pitt 16 years, counting his time as an assistant coach, when Barnes eased the buyout reins.
Since the Jim Killingsworth years, only one coach before Dixon had a .500 career record at TCU, Billy Tubbs. The leadership at TCU wasn’t ready to start over in basketball.
Waiving the high-dollar buyout, someone told me, “would have put us at least two or three years behind.”
It’s why a lot of universities started putting buyout clauses into their coaches’ contracts. My first lesson in buyouts, in fact, came from TCU in December 1994, when then-AD Frank Windegger held football coach Pat Sullivan’s hand to the fire when Sullivan wanted to leave for LSU.
Sullivan had just completed the 1994 regular season with a 7-4 record and an invitation to the Independence Bowl. LSU, meanwhile, had fallen on hard times with Curley Hallman as head coach and fired him after a fourth consecutive losing season. Seeking a successor, Tigers athletic director Joe Dean had been turned down, in order, by Mack Brown, then at North Carolina; Ron Zook, an assistant at Florida, and Bill Snyder, head coach at Kansas State.
Sullivan was LSU’s fourth choice. There were two years left on Sullivan’s contract with TCU, and he had assured Dean that the $400,000 buyout ($200,000 for each remaining season) would be no problem. LSU was prepared to kick in $100,000 of the 400K.
But Windegger held firm. Sullivan started suggesting ways to Dean that LSU could pay the full amount to TCU.
“He kept trying to hold Joe’s foot to the fire,” a LSU Board member told me. “We began to think, ‘Is this the guy we really want?'”
LSU had the money for the buyout, the board member assured. It just didn’t want to spend it on a coaching candidate that it felt had misled them.
Returning to Fort Worth, Sullivan publicly announced he was “removing” his name from consideration and staying at TCU.
“I know now this is my team and my family,” Sullivan said. “I’m sorry that they had to experience the distractions of the past week.”
(LSU, for what it’s worth, hired Vanderbilt coach Gerry DiNardo on the same day. DiNardo also had a buyout figure in his Vandy contract, but he informed LSU that he would pay it himself, which he did. DiNardo lasted five years at LSU and was replaced by a guy named Nick Saban.)
TCU’s week in limbo, however, caused a permanent fracture in Sullivan’s grip on the program. His ensuing seasons saw records of 6-5, 4-7 and 1-10, the last two in the Western Athletic Conference. Those back-to-back 7-4 and 6-5 regular seasons were the only winning ones that Sullivan had at TCU.
Dixon’s teams, on the other hand, have won 25 or more games eight times, in addition to 12 NCAA tournament appearances.
It would be rash to suggest that Dixon’s grip on the basketball program has been compromised by the UCLA episode. The resolution was swift. Unlike Sullivan, Dixon wasn’t whisked out of state for a job interview. No one at UCLA — nor at TCU, for that matter — is suggesting that they were misled by Jamie in any way.
On the contrary, the TCU people say Dixon has continued to do his job and work on recruiting this week.
“Jamie’s not the kind of person that would let this affect him,” said someone who was close to the Dixon discussions. “He’s going to bust his tail, same as always, because that’s the kind of person he is.”
A deal is a deal, as it turns out. “Because he’s our coach,” as Donati explained, the Frogs didn’t want to let Jamie Dixon go.
They knew that even before UCLA called.