Gentlemen, start your check writing.
Trailing the University of Hawaii was apparently a kiss of death for football coaches in the Mountain West Conference this season, where schools are spending freely to make changes.
After sacrificial Sunday, a day in which coaches at Nevada and San Jose State lost their jobs, three of the four teams that finished behind the second-place Rainbow Warriors in the West Division of the MWC have fired their head coaches.
What the firings — and the money being invested in making them — tell us is that the arms race is heating up in what was one of the worst-performing divisions in major college football this season.
Nevada terminated its coach, Brian Polian, after a 5-7 (3-5 conference) finish, and San Jose State parted company with Ron Caragher following a 4-8 (3-5) close. Both teams were part of a three-way tie for third place with Nevada-Las Vegas.
Earlier, cellar-dwelling Fresno State, which did not win a conference game, fired Tim DeRuyter, who was 1-7 (0-5) at the time.
UH, picked last in preseason polls, finished second at 4-4 behind defending champion San Diego State (6-2).
Only UNLV’s Tony Sanchez has survived. Of course, Sanchez was the only one of the four who finished below UH to defeat the Rainbow Warriors and has brought big booster money to UNLV in his two seasons.
Teams in the MWC West won a collective 39.7 percent of their games this season, barely edging out the Mid-American Conference East Division (38.9 percent).
Both were a far cry from the MWC’s Mountain Division, where teams won a collective 59.7 percent of their games.
And nowhere in the mild, mild West were things bleaker than at Fresno State, which went from first to worst in just two years. Only three years after going 11-2 and extending DeRuyter with a raise, the Bulldogs finished 1-11, prompting the house cleaning.
The Bulldogs will be paying nearly $3.5 million to finish out the contracts of DeRuyter and his two coordinators. This as his replacement, Jeff Tedford, starts collecting nearly $1.6 million and the Bulldogs prepare to shell out an additional $1.6 million for a new coaching staff, according to the Fresno Bee.
Both Polian and Caragher, who completed their fourth seasons, each had one year remaining on contracts paying $575,000 and $546,745 respectively, according to figures in a USA Today salary survey.
It would be noteworthy if the salaries of their eventual successors do not keep UH’s Nick Rolovich firmly at the bottom of the 12-member conference in base pay. Pending a raise, Rolovich is to receive $400,008 for each of the first two years of his four-year deal, according to terms of the contract.
The money being poured into salaries is in addition to facility improvements in the works or on the drawing boards at all three schools.
The ousters of Polian and Caragher came the day after each won their rivalry games — Nevada over UNLV and San Jose State over Fresno State. Polian was 23-27 and Caragher 19-30.
Significantly, however, in eight combined seasons there was only one winning record in conference (5-3 by Caragher in 2013, his first season) between them. It did not help perceptions that UH, which had been 0-8 in the conference in 2015, went into San Jose State and won with Dru Brown, a quarterback from the Spartans’ Northern California backyard.
Nor was Polian’s tenuous standing aided by Rolovich, his former offensive coordinator, beating the Wolfpack as part of a turnaround from 3-10.
So the hook has been out in the West Division — and so are the checkbooks.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
