An interesting read from the PD. Ohio has three: Solich, Phillips and Boldon.

Sort of chuckled when I read that Kent paid Haynes $884,444 last year and got two wins out of him -- $442,222 per win. And one of those was against a 1AA school. He was the fourth-highest paid college football coach in the state.

https://www.cleveland.com/expo/sports/g66l-2019/03/f802e8...

Two things I took note of from that list;

1. Jason Candle at #6 overall being paid $400K more than Solich last year and getting waxed two years in a row in Toledo's bowl games. He also makes Solich seem like a bargain.

2. Miami's HOCKEY coach comes in at #9 overall! He's also paid more than Solich. I had no idea hockey was such a big sport at Miami.

Miami, despite no real success in the sport previously, went all in on hockey to the detriment of their other sports in the early 2000s including a new arena. It seemed to pay off for them for awhile, and they had a decent run of 8 or 9 years where they were a top 10 program, but then the wheels came off. They locked themselves into the contract with the coach (and it's questionable now whether the success was the result of their coach or an assistant who's now at BG).

It's rather questionable if they can bounce back. Other than that brief period of being a top team (when in true Miami fashion they started calling themselves a "hockey school" and "college hockey's newest dynasty" despite not having actually won anything) they are in no way a college hockey blueblood. The shine is off their new arena which is nice but not anything truly special. They're locked into a prohibitive buyout with the coach. They're clearly the third best D1 program in Ohio, which is a state without much high school hockey culture.

Yeah, they had a two goal lead with a few minutes left in the game and crooked. It's been down hill since. They got big headed and joined the NCHC instead of staying with the core of what was left of the CCHA. They are bottom feeders of the NCHC with no real chance to get better.

Miami hubris really knows no bounds. Not only did they get big headed and think they could be a contender in the NCHC, but they went out of their way to blackball Bowling Green and keep them from being invited. Stabbing other in-state schools in the back (and we were certainly on the receiving end of it in the 60s) seems to be the only thing that Chicago's Safety School is really good at.

That's how I've felt about Solich the past couple of seasons. The fact is he's a name coach meaning the college football world knows him and he's won 100+ games at the school.

In the corporate world pay is tied to margin and responsibility. Football has a big staff to manage. Basketball and Hockey bring in revenue. Ohio State is paying its tennis coach 450k, more than all but a handful of college presidents in Ohio that have budgets in the 100's of millions. A tennis coach doesn't do much more than a personal trainer. They don't have a direct impact on the matches. A basketball coach can be loved/hated for a substitution in one particular game.

Kent State has a pretty well-known and respected golf program, with PGA and LPGA players to their credit, most notably Ben Curtis, John Hahn and Mackenzie Hughes.