Rick George and Tad Boyle are still discussing the NCAA Tournament appearance bonus

When Colorado Buffaloes athletic director Rick George first spoke to the media about the coronavirus pandemic, shortly after the cancellation of the Pac-12 Men’s Basketball Tournament, he said that he hadn’t spoken with head coach Tad Boyle about whether Boyle would receive all of his bonuses.

The biggest question mark was what would be done about the $105,000 Boyle was set to earn in response to his team’s appearance in the NCAA Tournament. Boyle’s team didn’t appear in the tournament because of its cancellation, but the Buffs were virtual locks to earn an at-large bid.

Boyle performed well enough to earn the money, but the issue isn’t that simple. One complication is that the CU athletics department won’t receive a payout from the NCAA for appearing in the tournament, again because the tournament was cancelled. In 2019, each NCAA Tournament game that a team played in earned the team’s conference about $1.6 million, payed out over six years. Some of the money went to the team and some was split among each member institution.

When putting together Boyle’s contract, George likely assumed that paying out an NCAA Tournament bonus to his coach would be easy to budget for, since the school would be earning more money.

So far, George and Boyle haven’t decided whether Boyle will warm $105,000 for his NCAA Tournament-caliber coaching, but George has a short update on the situation.

“We’ve had that conversation and we’re still having that conversation,” George said in a conference call with the media on Wednesday.

Apparently these negotiations were not open-and-closed, which makes sense given the moving parts around the athletics department.

There’s more:

“Tad and I have had a lot of conversations, not just about that, but about the future and the things that are going on in his program,” George said.

Boyle’s team got off to the best start in school history and had four chances to set the regular-season wins record at the end of the season, but lost all four. Then the Buffs were upset in the first round of the Pac-12 Tournament.

The end-of-year review may not have been as smooth as we anticipated back in February, but George doesn’t sound concerned about the situation.

“We’ll figure out that all looks like in the next few days but there’s been a lot of other important work that we’ve been doing,” George said.

The announcement about Boyle’s bonus should be on the way soon.

“We’ll let you know when we move forward,” George said.