The head coaching endowment docs schools don't want public

Hello and welcome to Thursday, or—as it’s now known—FOIAball day. 

As I said yesterday, today’s newsletter is for paid subscribers. What’s in it? How about a list of every single donation a university that bought its way into the playoff got this year? Or the agreements for endowed head coaching positions that we fought to get. 

We’re talking money and influence today. Which is a good hook to remind you all that I need your money. So I can have influence. 

The good kind, that is. 

What I really love about FOIA just so happens to be what is also making the world feel so bleak right now. 

This country’s richest and most powerful people have corrupted our public institutions for their own personal gain. They act with utter impunity, knowing we have little recourse. 

(I have not been spending most of my waking time reading the Epstein files, by the way. Why would you even think that?)

It’s a good time to remember that these places are only imbued with the power we grant them. They are answerable to you, regardless of how much money they rake in or how powerful their donor class is. 

I firmly believe in the power of public records to ensure the people are able to exercise oversight. It doesn’t have to be unearthing some giant conspiracy; it's pulling back the layers, bit by bit, to show what’s really behind the facade. 

Schools don’t love handing out who their donors are. They believe that data should be secret. Sadly, state legislatures have agreed.

A recent change to North Carolina law allows public universities to redact information surrounding even potential donors, a clause that—depending on how schools want to enforce it—could constitute the entire world.

That lack of transparency is what allows these places to run amok.

This week, on Bluesky, a user asked Extra Points’ Matt Brown about what recourse schools had for megadonors whose names were plastered across buildings and who appeared in the Epstein files. 

“Wonder if @mattbrown.bsky.social would know what moral clauses these types of contracts have, if any. Ex: questionable ethics aside, could UCLA remove Wass's name from the football complex, but still keep the money or does it get clawed back somehow?”

The answer is not really. Schools don’t love to share agreements with big donors. But FOIAball obtained the deals for endowed coaching positions at Cal-Berkeley, Michigan State, UVA, Illinois, and Bowling Green. 

None of those agreements contains any outs in them. 

Which makes sense. If someone is about to fork over a ton of money, a school isn’t going to insert a clause that says they reserve the right to strip away the honorific. But by knowing they don’t exist, we can start demanding them.

Because if I know one thing, it’s that any time a name goes up on something, there’s often a reason lurking somewhere for why it should be taken down.

I’m gonna share those agreements below, but first I want to talk a little bit more about the secrecy of college donations and what I’ve uncovered.