Basketball: A tale of 2 programs

Princeton fans undoubtedly felt a slight twinge of jealousy as the men’s basketball program still reels from the departure of head coach Sydney Johnson ’97 to Fairfield University. Since the announcement just over a week ago, theories have swirled, emotions have ridden high and the shocked Princeton community has sought desperately for answers.

Months ago in December, Johnson called for Princeton’s administration to step up its dedication to the program. In a piece by Andy Glockner for Sports Illustrated, Johnson responded to Harvard’s improvement by saying, “As a Princeton guy, my love is for this program, so let’s have a response, make sure we respond to somebody trying to take what we established.”

Four months later, Johnson announced that he would take the position at Fairfield, indicating that he did not get the response he was looking for. The question remaining, however, is this: What exactly didn’t Johnson get? What drove him to Fairfield? There are several possibilities being debated by experts on Ivy League basketball.

The most common explanation is money. Neither school publicly discloses salary data, but rumors indicate that Johnson is making roughly twice as much at Fairfield than he would have at Princeton.

“I don’t know what Johnson made, but it would be surprising to me if it was more than what an entry-level coach would make in Division I, something in the $200 [thousand] range,” said Mike James, a labor finance analyst for the NFL who closely follows Ivy League basketball. “More important than pay, I think, was the concept that Princeton was never going to pay more.”

ESPN’s Andy Katz also said he believed Johnson’s pay was in that range and wrote last week, “Princeton needs to start paying in the $300,000 range to keep someone like Johnson.”

According to data released in accordance with the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, Fairfield has a much larger men’s basketball budget than Princeton. Though athletic scholarships — which Princeton cannot offer — and greater gameday expenses close the gap somewhat, Fairfield has $1.02 million unaccounted for in the disclosed categories, nearly $400,000 more than Princeton. This money goes towards coaches’ salaries and recruiting expenses, among others, supporting the rumored discrepancy in coaching pay.

However, James was quick to de-emphasize the monetary aspect.

“There’s no way Johnson left over money, over purely money,” he said. “He wouldn’t have made this parallel prestige move if he didn’t think the administration support was there he needed to win.”

Struggling to admit desired athletes was at least one hurdle that Johnson may have been trying to escape.

“I think you now have a landscape where other schools may or may not be tinkering with their admissions standards, or may be more aggressive about the acceptance of transfers, or may just put a greater focus on their basketball programs than ever before,” Jon Solomon, editor of princetonbasketball.com, said. “There’s a justifiable concern that Princeton may not be able to compete on a slanted playing field.”

In the Ivy League, admitted athletes are graded on the Academic Index, which uses SAT scores and class rank to quantify a student’s academic merit. The academic index for all recruited athletes must be within one standard deviation of that of the student body, but the athletic program decides how to distribute this statistic between its teams.

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“There are rumors that Harvard has shifted some of its AI points to men’s basketball,” James said. “There’s an indication that one of the reasons Johnson might have left is because he couldn’t get the AI points he needed.”

On top of these possible difficulties, Johnson’s career move seems to come at what would be the peak of his Princeton tenure. It is likely that the move to Fairfield was the smartest choice to advance his still-young career.

“He’s been there for four years, in one recruiting class he made the NCAA Tournament, and he started with the worst record in Princeton basketball,” said Michele Steele, Sports Business and Media Reporter at Bloomberg Television. “This is a guy with ambition. Despite being a company man, so to speak, he is setting his sights pretty high, and I think the move to the MAAC, Fairfield’s athletic conference, represents that.”

Johnson’s departure is the latest in a string of short tenures of men’s basketball head coaches at Princeton, and his successor will be the fifth coach the team has had since long-time coach Pete Carril left in 1996.

“The days of a 29-year lifer are gone,” Solomon said. “It’s a pretty complicated series of variables, but I’d be curious to know what needs to be done if the [next] coach of Princeton is going to be able to stick around longer than his freshman class does.”

“All of these Princeton people are vaguely deluded by Pete Carril is staying there and being incredibly loyal,” James said.

All of Johnson’s predecessors, and Johnson himself, were involved in some way in the Carril era. This influence Carril seems to hold over Princeton’s attitude to basketball may be part of the reason that the job has become, as James termed it, “a revolving door.”

“Eventually it seems like there will be a break from that lineage of all the branches of the Carril cradle,” Solomon mused, “I’m not sure if this is going to be when that finally happens.”