LISTEN: ‘Finances played a large role’ in Ole Miss keeping Bianco around for ‘25
Mike Bianco will return as Ole Miss head baseball coach in 2025.
He’ll be in his 25th season leading the Rebels.
Bianco helped the Rebels to their one and only national championship back in the summer of 2022. Pretty much everything else the last three years, though, has been pretty miserable.
Ole Miss has won just 36 percent (36-64) of its SEC games — an average of 10.3 wins and 19.7 losses. The Rebels have finished below .500 and missed the postseason entirely the last two.
They were in contention for an NCAA Tournament berth going into the final weeks of this season. However, Ole Miss dropped each of its last five games, including a first-round exit in the SEC Tournament.
Still, Bianco said Tuesday following the loss, another to in-state rival Mississippi State, he expected to return.
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Reporting emerged Thursday all but officially making that expectation a reality.
“The fact of the matter is finances played a large role in Mike Bianco returning to Ole Miss in two different ways,” Chase Parham, who broke the news, said during a stop by the Ole Miss Spirit’s ‘Flagship’ podcast on Friday.
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“He has an hellaciously large buyout. It was going to cost $7.7 million dollars to get rid of him. His buyout was going to be $5.2 over four years, but a quarter of that would be due in the first year. There would be a tax put on his buyout that was over $1 million dollars. That was going to be due immediately in the first year. (Top Ole Miss) assistants (Carl Lafferty and Mike Clement) had to have a year bought out. It was really expensive.
“If you wanted to hire (Clemson’s) Erik Bakich, his buyout was $1.7 million dollars. Add that to it. Then you’ve got to pay his salary. So, it’s a $10-million-dollar change, with the majority of that being in the first 365 days.
“All those things in addition to the House case that we don’t know what’s about to come … I was told probably between $19 and 21 million SEC schools are going to have to start to pay to players starting as early as August 2025. That’s a huge line out on budget that simply makes it untenable to make a change right now, regardless of what you think is going on on the field.”
