Cannot Falter

You go to LA for a couple days and this is the type of news that gets dropped on you. Tom Crean’s contract was believed to for 8 years at an average of $2.3 million per, or about $18 million. In actuality, it appears Crean’s contract will include two more years, and the total value of which will be close to $23 million. So it appears that Crean has gotten a $4.5 million contract extension before he’s coached his first game.

Technically, Crean is not getting an extension. It appears he’s simply negotiated more years, up to now over what he had at Marquette, which was a 10 year contract he signed in 2006 which ran through the 2016-2017 season. This means Crean should be “locked up” (at least as locked up as college coaches can be) through 2017-2018. It also hopefully means that IU is avoiding the odd situation that occured in Lexington this year where Billy Gillispie operated without a finalized contract for a whole season, and still has not signed a formal deal with the University of Kentucky.

For better or worse, IU appears to be committing to Crean and hopefully Crean to IU. In reality though, this neither locks IU or Crean together any longer as long as the buyouts do not change. It will still cost IU $3 million to fire Crean before the final year of the contract, and Crean’s buyout to leave IU will likely decrease from $3 million to $1 million over the life of the contract, just like it did in the MOU (pdf).

The better message that’s being sent though is that stability is key for IU Basketball. While IU fans ask for stability and healing and reconcilation, they rarely want to offer up the money and security to a coach to allow him to do those things. Here, Crean has a certain level of stability to build the program slowly, carefully, and by making all the proper steps, not shortcuts. While I disagree with people who see the program as being light years away from where Sampson, Davis, or Knight in his last years had it, it will still take Crean a while to get to where IU Basketball is “supposed” to be: regularly competing for national titles. Even entertaining the fiction that Crean is “locked up” for 10 years is a big step toward getting to that level.

Finally, it’s not hard to see how this might have happened. While Tom Crean certainly had a lot of security before, a lot of that security disappeared when Rick Greenspan announced he was leaving at the end of the year. Crean will not be coaching for the AD that hired him, not to mention an AD who had to have this hire work in order to keep the job. If Crean wasn’t up to snuff in any way, Greenspan certainly would not have survived. Now that arguably Crean’s biggest backer is gone, it may have been important for him to get whatever extra security he could.

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