Gene Taylor talks coaching salaries, new budget demands and basketball struggles
There was a bit of irony involved for Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor last week when Michigan State poached defensive coordinator Scottie Hazelton from the Wildcats for a salary of around $1 million.
That was an offer Taylor couldn’t match, but Taylor had agreed to at least enhance Hazelton’s contract earlier in the winter when Washington State and Mississippi State expressed interest in him.
Taylor said Friday during an interview with The Wichita Eagle that he had a handshake agreement in place to boost Hazelton’s salary by $100,000, which would have made him the highest paid assistant coach in school history at $650,000. Taylor said K-State is also giving offensive coordinator Courtney Messingham a $100,000 raise, which will bring him up to $600,000, to go along with nice bumps in pay for promoted defensive coordinator Joe Klanderman and cornerbacks coach Van Malone.
In all, Taylor said every assistant on Chris Klieman’s football staff will receive a raise of at least $25,000 by the time spring practice ends next month. Once K-State makes the hiring of linebackers coach Steve Stanard official, the football team’s salary pool for assistants will climb to $3.92 million, up from $3.47 million last season.
Taylor said K-State is also paying strength and conditioning coach Chris Dawson, who received interest from Alabama when it had an opening earlier this offseason, $400,000 in salary.
But none of that stopped fans from bombarding Taylor with questions about finances and coaching salaries.
“Sometimes those numbers aren’t so big that we can’t make it work and keep them here, but when you are talking about $300,000 or more those are bigger challenges,” Taylor said. “It’s not just that one individual. How does that affect the other coaches on staff? If you’ve got Courtney on the other side of the ball doing a similar job with similar experiences how do you pay one $300,000 more? Even if we would have had the money, I don’t know that Chris would have felt comfortable having that big of a discrepancy between his two coordinators.”
As February neared its end, it looked like K-State had done enough to keep Klieman’s coaching staff intact coming off an 8-5 debut season. The only thing that changed that was Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio abruptly choosing to retire. The Spartans then hired Mel Tucker away from Colorado and gave him $6 million to spend on assistants.
Taylor wants K-State to compete with its Big 12 peers when it comes to facilities and coaching salaries, but that was too big of a bridge to gap.
“If we had unlimited dollars, would we have made more of an effort? Yeah, probably,” Taylor said. “But we also have to keep in mind they are making pretty good money. They aren’t at the bottom of the Big 12. We need to stay competitive, but we need to stay within our means, too.”
Hazelton’s departure raised an interesting question for Taylor. Is there a maximum salary for K-State football assistants?
“I don’t see us every paying a coordinator seven figures,” Taylor said. “It’s not going to happen anytime soon, for sure. In terms of a head coach, we are going to do everything we can to keep Chris happy but if one day somebody comes in and says we want to pay you $5 million we probably couldn’t go there either.”
Klieman is set to make $2.5 million in salary next season.
New expenses on the horizon
Taylor is proud that K-State has been able to pay its football coaches those numbers as the athletic department continues to face climbing expenses, which are expected to total more than $83 million during the 2020 fiscal year.
That includes $3 million that K-State is paying former coach Bill Snyder in quarterly installments of $250,000 as part of his retirement agreement, and an extra $250,000 that the athletic department will send to the school’s academic side.
K-State athletics expects that number to move north of $450,000 in 2021. Taylor said that will come on top of about $800,000 that the athletic department paid the school for support, including the school band.
The Wildcats recently became a self-sustaining athletic department by eliminating student fees and school funding that previously went into the athletics budget. Now it will donate money to the school itself. That is not uncommon in college athletics, but it does put extra strain on K-State’s spending abilities.
“It’s obviously another expense,” Taylor said. “We knew it was coming and we planned for it. But that is going to go up each year. We have just got to figure out how to make it work.”
Taylor talks basketball
Taylor also touched on another hot topic that K-State fans have debated in recent months: men’s basketball struggles.
A year after the Wildcats won 25 games and shared a Big 12 championship with Texas Tech, Bruce Weber’s team has fallen on hard times. K-State (9-21, 2-15 Big 12) set the school record for both overall losses and conference losses this season.
Many fans are showing patience in Weber as he tries to rebuild following the departures of Barry Brown, Kamau Stokes and Dean Wade. But some have expressed frustration about the a historically poor season.
Taylor says no one is more disappointed in those results than K-State’s players and coaches, but other programs such as North Carolina and West Virginia have faced similar struggles recently.
“When you build a program that right way and you have high school kids who turn into what Barry Brown and Dean Wade for us you are going to have three years of success and then they graduate,” Taylor said. “You have to start over. You are going to have a down year. Now we have to rebuild. That is just kind of the trend and it will probably increase like that if the NBA gets rid of the one-and-done rule.”
He remains confident the Wildcats will bounce back, especially with a top 25 recruiting class on the way.
“Very confident,” Taylor said. “From what I have seen on paper about the kids coming in and the attitude of the players that are coming back, things look good.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2020 at 2:54 PM with the headline "Gene Taylor talks coaching salaries, new budget demands and basketball struggles."