Pretty solid from pennlive.com
Al Golden doesn’t merely have a career choice to make in the next few days. He has arrived at a fork in his life’s road.
The former Penn State tight end and Temple head coach has just completed his third season at a place from which successful coaches commonly graduate to the National Football League. If you win big with the Miami Hurricanes, you are by default a hot NFL commodity because of all the talent that runs through the program.
When you become known as a guy who can manage gifted players, the NFL will beat a path to your door. It did to that of Jimmy Johnson, Dennis Erickson and Butch Davis. All three locked up NFL jobs and made their big money there.
You do not make your big money coaching at Miami. For all the notoriety the Hurricanes bring and the hype that surrounds them, home crowds are typically half-full gatherings of fickle fans. Too many other attractions abound in warm and watery South Florida. The sports dollar is split too many ways and the two-time NBA champion Heat is recently taking a large share of what would otherwise be everyone’s money.
Further, Miami is a relatively small private school lacking a huge endowment or donor base. The city lacks many large corporate businesses. The running joke is that the same handful of athletic donors have been showing up at school functions for decades.
But, if Golden ultimately wants to take his shot at the NFL, he’s in the right place and merely needs to keep at it. Miami self-imposed undisclosed scholarship sanctions and banned itself from bowls after the Nevin Shapiro fiasco which broke shortly after Golden arrived. He was reportedly none too pleased about not being fully informed before his hiring about Shapiro by university administrators who conceivably could have seen the scandal coming.
An inept and bumbling NCAA investigation dragged on two years before spitting out in the fall a relative wrist slap – a reduction of 9 scholarships over 3 years.
The sanctions have virtually been weathered already. Miami played in a bowl for the first time in three years last Saturday, losing to Louisville in the Russell Athletic Bowl in Orlando. Golden gave his staff this week off. They have a 9 a.m. meeting Monday but have essentially been kept in the dark about Golden’s intentions while Penn State rumors swirl, according to a Miami source. Golden has not cleared the air publicly and has not spoken to reporters. A very good recruiting class of Miami verbal commits stands in the balance.
No one really knows what Golden is making on his Miami contract because the school is private and is not bound by Freedom of Information Act transparency laws. USA Today recently quoted Golden’s annual salary at $2.15 million which would place him in the bottom half among ACC head coaches. South Florida sources to whom I’ve spoken believe the university and its president Donna Shalala are unwilling to engage in much of a bidding war with PSU or anyone else.
That’s never been the way Miami operates. In fact, prior coach Randy Shannon was one of the lowest-paid AQ-conference coaches in the nation, originally making a reported $800,000 before being bumped up mid-contract to a reported $1.4 million.
So, if Penn State decides it wants Golden and wants to back up the truck to bring him home, he would seem to be available. They ended up paying Bill O'Brien $3.6 million annually. There are “heartstrings” attaching Golden to Penn State, in the terms of a source close to him. Both he and his wife Kelly are PSU grads. She grew up in Pennsylvania, he in central Jersey.
Then again, it’s not as if either of the Goldens are itching to leave as a domestic choice. I’ve been told Kelly Golden very much enjoys South Florida and their parents each winter along the Florida Suncoast.
Still, from a career standpoint, Miami is not a place you stay for 10 or 20 years. It’s a checkpoint en route to a destination. In contrast, Penn State is certainly a destination job for an alum like Golden. So, his choice is clear.
Golden’s agent Brett Senior, a Philadelphia resident with an office near the Main Line and a PSU grad himself, certainly knows the turf he’s working here. If Golden merely wants to bump up the salary of his Miami assistants, I suppose that’s possible. But any significant raise for him is unlikely on the heels of a 9-4 season, 5-3 in the ACC including a loss to eventual division champion Duke.
In fact, fan sentiment toward retaining him has been notably tepid. Hurricane fans seem grateful for his integrity and leadership in helping the program endure the uncertainty and trials of the last three years. But many of the same folks seem perfectly willing to see another coach such as abruptly fired Cleveland Browns coach and Miami grad Rob Chudzinski arrive in Golden’s place. That's the transience Miami fans routinely accept; they're used to it.
In short, if Penn State really wants him and athletic director Dave Joyner shows it, Golden is available.
DAVID JONES:
djones@pennlive.com.
