Error: Circular Reference
Les Miles will remain as coach of the LSU football team (at least for a while) despite being wooed by Michigan. (LSU must wonder what's wrong with their coaching job - they have won two national championships this decade but can't get a coach to stay).
In order to keep Les Miles, LSU inserted this clause in his contract:
Should Miles win the BCS championship [ed: which he now has accomplished] his contract states he has to be
among the top three paid college coaches in the nation, which would
bump him to the $3.5 million range.
This is not uncommon language now in sports contracts. For example, players with a franchise tag in the NFL must get a salary equal to or greater than the average of the top five players at that position.
So here is my question. What happens if three other college coaches, say Pete Carrol, Jim Tressel, and Urban Meyer (who have all won national championships in the last 10 years) were to demand that they too should be guaranteed a salary that puts them in the top three coaches? Don't things start getting real recursive at this point?
Postscript: Yeah, I know, the language generally says they get bumped to a top X position on the day of a certain event, like winning the BCS or having the franchise tag applied, which circumvents the circularity problem, mostly, by not being an open-ended reset. It is still funny to think about. There is nothing to stop 4 coaches from negotiating a clause with an open-ended reset such that their salaries would spiral to infinity. Even Solomon might struggle with that one when it went to court, though the Gordian Knot solution would be to just run one of the four through with a sword.
I wonder if this has ever happened, say with two CEO's that had contracts that guaranteed that each would, at any given time, be the highest paid CEO in the Fortune 500.
