You Don't Know It, But You Owe Me Money

It's bad when you go from being the Athletic Director at a school to being reassigned to the "K-State Olathe Innovation Campus." It's worse when your boss finds out that in addition to not doing your job particularly well, you've entered into an expensive, nonsensical, and completely unauthorized settlement deal with a recently fired football coach for millions of dollars.

When you've screwed up this badly you usually offer up your immediate resignation, unless you have no shame whatsoever. Since he is not Isiah Thomas, this is precisely what former Kansas State AD Bob Krause did after it came to light that not only had he hired Ron Prince, an iffy pick who yielded iffy results for the Wildcats over four years of mediocrity, but he had promised the coach a bizarre $3.2 million payout from 2015-2020 secret to everyone except Krause, Prince, and his attorney.

This came as quite a surprise to Kansas State, who plans on fighting the payout in court:

"This deal was apparently constructed as a further supplement to the buyout provision contained in Prince's employment contract," associate athletic director Jim Epps said in a statement. "I do not know why any additional supplement was justified, or why Bob Krause concealed this agreement from everyone until it was inadvertently discovered last week."

In case Ron Prince's future head coaching career wasn't significantly dented already, the additional resume point of "may engage in bizarre back-end compensation deals with your AD" will likely dent it further.

This entire story is a reminder that The Office is fiction, because in real life actual management is far, far worse than depicted on the show.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.