The University of Michigan has itself a new basketball coach. As expected they signed up John Beilein who had been the head man at West Virginia until the Wolverines bought him out and inked him to a million dollar a year contract to replace Tommy Amaker. Mgoblog is watching and blogging the introductory press conference right now.
The buyout cost them $2.5 million on top of that multiyear deal, which the Ann Arbor News says is for six years and calls for $200,000 in base salary and $1.1 million from other streams. That's a lot of bacon to fry up for a guy who never even visited Ann Arbor before agreeing to the job. Since he's also talked of his desire for a National Championship you have to wonder how much time he's spent researching the team he's taking over. I must admit, I'm a little dubious about why he was in such a hurry to leave a program he'd built up from nothing into a Big East contender with so little interest into the place he was headed next.
That said, unless Beilein quits and returns to Morgantown 24 hours from now, the Michigan athletic department did a better job filling their vacancy than their counterparts in Arkansas. Dana Altman, announced yesterday as the new Razorback head man, quit the Arkansas gig and went running back to Creighton and his old job. Emulating former coaching greats like Bobby Cremins and Rick Majerus, Altman cited his family and his connections to people associated with the Omaha school as the reasons why he abandoned his new employers. Arkansas is running pretty short on options and would probably be happy if they could rescind the firing of Stan Heath. John Calipari and Billy Gillespie wanted nothing to do with the job, John Wooden looked out of it at the McDonald's All-America game, Keith Richards' father was snorted up like day-old coke, Eddie Robinson's dead and even Nolan Richardson has a new job lined up.
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