After Dave Aranda concocted the schemes and made the calls to help the University of Hawaii blunt Navy’s triple option in a 2009 upset, head coach Greg McMackin forecast a bright future for the assistant he’d refer to as “the genius.”
“He’s going onto big, big things,” McMackin predicted.
At the time it was assumed that McMackin meant the promotion to defensive coordinator he bestowed upon Aranda soon afterward.
Now we know he was talking dollar signs, if not a place in history.
This week Aranda became the smiling face of the heightened arms race in college athletics, receiving a guaranteed $10 million, four-year deal to remain as Louisiana State’s defensive coordinator.
The $700,000 annual raise to an average of $2.5 million per season makes him not only the highest paid assistant coach in college athletics and the first to top the $2 million-a-year threshold, but places him ahead of 83 major college head coaches in annual salary.
To provide some perspective, Aranda will earn more in 2018 than the entire 11-member UH football coaching staff. Or, to put it another way, he will take in more before St. Patrick’s Day than UH’s current head coach, Nick Rolovich, will make in the full year.
In seven years, Aranda has seen his salary rise to 19 times what he made laboring at UH.
To be sure Aranda is an immensely talented and hard-working guy whose ability to watch and critically dissect hours of video each day knows few bounds. The kind of coach, legend has it, who opens presents Christmas morning and is back at the office chest-deep in X’s and O’s by noon.
As such, nobody should begrudge him cashing in on the ingenuity and diesel drive that have produced six consecutive seasons of top-20 scoring defenses across three different schools, including the No. 1 unit (13.7 points a game) at Wisconsin in 2015. In 2016 at LSU, Aranda’s defense yielded the fewest touchdowns (16) and TDs per game (1.3) in the country.
But he was also in the right place, Baton Rouge, La., at the right time, smack dab amid the runaway arms race among football’s elite.
Aranda was earning a nifty $1.8 million a season until Texas A&M, aka Texas ATM, paraded a fleet of armor cars.
The Aggies, who enticed Jimbo Fisher to leave Florida State last month and become their head coach for a 10-year, $75 million deal, apparently had some moolah still burning a hole in their vault.
Twice, it has been reported, they set their sights on Aranda, pitching him on the wonders of College Station and banking options there.
But, ultimately, LSU’s administration was prevailed upon to put heart, soul and cashier’s checks behind a campaign to retain Aranda’s services.
While it was a success for LSU, it was yet another two-part reminder why this season’s undefeated Central Florida and the non-Power Five conference schools will not win national championships. Officially sanctioned ones, that is.
For one thing, as we have seen, the upper crust has the resources to pay an obscenely high top dollar to attract and retain the coaches it wants. Anybody who distinguishes himself, as Aranda did in two years as DC at UH and then one at Utah State, is quickly scooped up by the well-heeled — in this case, Wisconsin.
For another, the Power Five schools have so much invested in their programs that they are not about to let more than a few crumbs fall to the outsiders. That’s why the current, as well as any future playoff formats, will be heavily stacked to preserve the existing order.
So, toast the good fortune of someone who has earned it, but be cognizant of what the widening divide means to the UCFs of college athletics.
