How Will Healy’s new contract can improve the Charlotte 49ers football schedule

Charlotte 49ers football coach Will Healy’s newly extended contract contains a little-used, but highly imaginative, stipulation.

The clause comes within Healy’s buyout, some of which has the boilerplate language that if he leaves Charlotte before the new contract expires in 2026, he must pay the 49ers the $631,250 if it happens in the first year, or $505,000 in any of the contract’s remaining years.

Also in the buyout: If Healy were to terminate the contract and depart for another head-coaching job in the Football Bowl Subdivision, his new team would have to play the 49ers in a home-and-home series within six years of his leaving Charlotte.

“When negotiating Will’s contract, we thought this could be a creative way to schedule a home-and-home series with a significant opponent,” 49ers athletics director Mike Hill said. “We’re always looking for ways to attract big names to our campus. This could be a way to do that.”

The buyout’s home-and-home idea isn’t new, but it’s rare.

The genesis of the concept can likely be traced back to 1995, when Dick Sander, then the athletics director at Virginia Commonwealth, was trying to figure out a way to minimize the financial damage that a pending break up of the old Metro Conference might have on his program.

With several Metro schools planning to split off and form Conference USA, Sander insisted that part of the settlement of those teams leaving — one of them was Charlotte — was for each to schedule a game against VCU in Richmond. The 49ers did, losing to the Rams 85-74 the following season.

“We were always looking for ways to get games, and this was a way to do it,” Sander told the Observer.

Sander expanded on the idea in 2002 when he promoted a young coach and former Duke guard named Jeff Capel from assistant to head coach.

“We were dealing with Jeff, who didn’t have tons of money, and we didn’t want to inhibit his ability to get a Power 5 job by putting in an outlandish buyout,” said Sander, now director of the Center for Global Sport Leadership at East Tennessee State. “Again, I was always looking for games, for ways to get in the door with big programs”

Sander wrote into Capel’s contract that if he took a job at another Division I program, a home-and-home series would be part of his buyout.

“It wasn’t mean-spirited or vindictive,” Sander said. “There was a lot of value for Jeff coming back. It was a way to reconnect with him. But the logic behind it was, we were just looking for games.”

Capel left for Oklahoma in 2006 (he’s now head coach at Pittsburgh). Two years later, the Sooners included the Rams in a tournament in Oklahoma City — an Oklahoma victory. A year later, in 2009, Capel brought the Sooners to VCU, where the Rams won 82-69.

The home-and-home clause has been written into each VCU basketball coach’s contract ever since.

The Rams have also played Alabama and former coach Anthony Grant, Texas and Shaka Smart, and LSU and Will Wade. It has worked out well for the Rams, who won at least one game in each of those series. VCU beat LSU in Baton Rouge, La., in November and has a home game scheduled with the Tigers next season.

The clause is also included in the Rams’ women’s basketball coaches’ contracts.

“It’s never been debated,” VCU athletics director Ed McLaughlin said. “We had one coach who didn’t want to play the series, but his new AD said, ‘no we’re going to play it.’

“For schools like us, and Charlotte’s also got football, to get really good home games with Power 5 teams isn’t easy. This is a baked in one for us that’s worked really well.”

VCU doesn’t have a football program. Charlotte’s Hill said 49ers basketball coach Ron Sanchez’s contract doesn’t have a similar provision.

There are other examples of the stipulation:

Part of Jim McElwain’s negotiated buyout when he left Colorado State for Florida in 2015 was that he Rams play a game in Gainesville. Hill was an associate AD at Florida at the time. The Gators hosted CSU in 2018, even though McElwain had been fired by the Gators a year earlier.

Old Dominion has used it with some of their coaches, a Monarchs spokesman said, but not with new football coach Ricky Rahne.

When Monarchs athletics director Wood Selig held the same position at Western Kentucky in the early 2000s, he included a similar provision in basketball coach Dennis Felton’s contract.

Sure enough, when Felton left for Georgia in 2003, the Bulldogs and Hilltoppers scheduled a home-and-home series.

Charlotte’s Hill said representatives of Healy’s agent Jimmy Sexton agreed that the concept was solid, allowing the financial portion of the buyout for Healy to be smaller by potentially providing the 49ers with a large payday that would come with playing a Power 5 team twice.

The 49ers routinely play Power 5 teams (as do most Conference USA teams), including a game at Clemson last season. They will play at Duke and Tennessee in 2020, but don’t have a home game against a Power 5 team until 2021 when the Blue Devils come to Richardson Stadium. The 49ers will play host to Maryland in 2022 and North Carolina in 2025.

And there’s little doubt that Healy will continue to be a hot coaching prospect, if the trajectory of the 49ers’ program continues as it did this fall — his first at Charlotte — when the 49ers finished with a winning record and made a bowl appearance for the first time in program history.

There is always a chance the opposing school can pay enough to not have to play. Hill said there’s such a clause in Healy’s contract.

“We would certainly push for the home-and-home, and financially, that institution would have to make that choice,” said Hill. “But it would be hefty.”

This story was originally published February 14, 2020 at 2:04 PM.