I love Coach Ben Howland and I will never get tired of saying it. Just like he never gets tired of explaining what it means to coach our alma mater:
"But how many people out there wake up every day and say they love what they do and have the passion for and real love of their job?" Howland said. "I get to work with the best and the brightest at UCLA.
"We get to recruit great kids, and that makes coaching very fun for me. I'm paid very competitively and I'm not going anywhere. That's what I tell our recruits."
That was from the LA Times report on the latest K extension Coach Howland signed with UCLA (diaried by captain mightykite). The Daily News also has a report on the best news during this dark and gloomy football season:
"We get to recruit great kids, and that makes coaching very fun for me. I'm paid very competitively and I'm not going anywhere. That's what I tell our recruits."
Ben Howland will have a little more coin jingling in his pocket this season.
Howland signed a new contract with UCLA on Wednesday that will pay him a guaranteed salary of $1.5 million this season and give him an additional year. That's $300,000 more than he would've made with the extension he received in 2006.
The length of the contract, seven years, is the same length as the one he signed last year, although the new one takes him through the 2013-14 season.
Howland receives a bump in salary each year and is scheduled to make $2 million in the final season of the contract.
"I've got the best job in the country," Howland said by phone from the Atlanta airport while on a recruiting trip. "I'm paid very, very well. I'm lucky and blessed. I feel lucky and very fortunate in terms of my compensation package."
The contract extension surely must look good to recruits, as do the back-to-back Final Four appearances.
And it looks great to rest of Bruins Nation, where we all feel "lucky and blessed" to have the best basketball coach in America to lead the greatest program of all time. The man deserves every penny of that raise/extension and then some more. He is the ultimate model of what UCLA athletics should be all about, as opposed to the doofus coaching our other major program.Howland signed a new contract with UCLA on Wednesday that will pay him a guaranteed salary of $1.5 million this season and give him an additional year. That's $300,000 more than he would've made with the extension he received in 2006.
The length of the contract, seven years, is the same length as the one he signed last year, although the new one takes him through the 2013-14 season.
Howland receives a bump in salary each year and is scheduled to make $2 million in the final season of the contract.
"I've got the best job in the country," Howland said by phone from the Atlanta airport while on a recruiting trip. "I'm paid very, very well. I'm lucky and blessed. I feel lucky and very fortunate in terms of my compensation package."
The contract extension surely must look good to recruits, as do the back-to-back Final Four appearances.
One point I have to make though that it is encouraging to see how smoothly UCLA reupped Coach Howland’s K (as indicated in the LAT report Howland made sure to note that the K negotiations were not "contentious"). To me it sends a signal that Dalis days of penny pinching are over. And if you add that to picture of how UCLA also paid up for assistants for even a doofus like Dorrell (again remember during Dalis days when Toledo was losing assistants to Cal (Ron Borges) b/c UCLA refusing to increase his salary), I think you can take it as a sign that money will be there when Bruins will be looking for a new football coach.
But we will talk more about that later. For now lets soak in the good news today and make sure we all raise a little toast to the best basketball coach in America.
We love you Coach Howland and don’t ever think about leaving us.
GO BRUINS.