Coaching deals taking longer

Contract negotiations for successful university athletic coaches are getting more complicated every year. Auburn University, for example, has four of its top coaches unsigned, and negotiations are continuing.  The most prominent of them is football coach Tommy (“13-0”) Tuberville, who has agreed “in principle” to seven years at $2 million a year, but the devils are in the details.

“It’s a litigious society that we live in,” says the school’s athletic director. “It’s always this, that and the other. If you’re going to have something for three, four, five years, you want to be able to live with it.”