Lyons Explains the Decision to Give Neal Brown a Contract Extension
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Exactly two weeks ago, West Virginia University made the decision to fire Athletic Director Shane Lyons. Shortly after being relieved of his duties, Lyons accepted a job offer to return to Alabama as the Executive Athletic Director and Chief Operating Officer.
Since that decision was made there has been a lot of speculation as to what went on behind closed doors that crumbled the relationship between Lyons and President E. Gordon Gee. As you could have guessed, the two-year contract extension given to Neal Brown played a major factor in Lyons' dismissal.
"It boils down to the football situation. A lot of heat was surrounding our football program at that time and I look at it that I'm the scapegoat," Lyons said during an interview with Metro News Monday morning. "I mean, let's go back. The big thing is is about the contract extension of Neal Brown. So I looked at that and I got back to 2020 and Neal had been here two years. I get it. His record was .500 at the time, but I looked at the first two years and the trajectory of the program and where it was heading. It was heading in the right direction. The culture was right. The student-athletes, the type of recruiting - everything that was happening in that program was heading in the right direction. His name had come up for a couple jobs; Auburn and South Carolina. So, as an athletic director, you start juggling this to say, 'what if he wins the next year?' Well if he wins the next year, his buyout was like $1.5 million-$2 million, which is not much in our business. So my thinking was we need to increase his buyout if he ends up leaving to close to $5 million, which we ended up doing. But in turn, they negotiated on their side to say, well, if he stays and you fire him, then you owe a certain amount which was 100% of his contract. I say all that because that's just not done in a vacuum. That's just not a Shane Lyons decision or an athletic director's decision. There's other people that's involved in that, including the president.
"Yeah, I mean we pitched it to say we want to keep Neal and we think he's the future of our football program and with this, we need to go back to his agents and work a deal and that's what happened. It wasn't an overnight [decision]. This was several backs and forths and President Gee was involved and [Interim AD] Rob Alsop was involved, and ultimately, the Chairman of the Board Dave Alavarez signed off. So, it's not done in a vacuum that Shane Lyons did this deal on his own. These types of deals and these type of contracts, and especially with a high-profile football coach, it's done in collaboration with other individuals."
Was the extension a good idea? No, probably not. It's understandable, when you look at it from Shane's perspective, as to why you would do it, though. You can't afford to lose a coach two years after hiring him because he has a low buy-out. Now, you could view that as bad negotiating on WVU's part to not have the initial buyout higher than $1 million and I would tend to agree with you.
The one thing I completely agree with Lyons on is that this isn't just his decision. The same people who are upset with the state of the football program are some of the same people that hired Shane Lyons, signed off on hiring Neal Brown, and signed off on giving Brown a contract extension just two years into his tenure. To me, it's a whole lot of finger pointing and that's a major problem. Taking accountability for the situation would be to answer questions from the media at interim AD Rob Alsop's press conference. But for some reason, we haven't heard a word from the decision makers other than what has been put out in a press release by the university.
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