This will probably pop some eyes, but WVU is preparing to pay offensive assistants $2.55 million in base salary for the 2011 season. In 2010, WVU paid its nine offensive and defensive assistants $1.925 million. 

In all, WVU will pay assistants $1.5 million more in base salary for the 2011 season than it did this past season — a 78-percent jump.

Something to think about and to talk about in today’s 1 p.m. live chat.

(Base salary, by the way, is what the contract guarantees. Assistants will make more than that — sometimes far more than that,  in the case of a Jeff Casteel — with income from camps and incentives and the like, but it’s not a cement figure. The base salary is. It’s something we can talk about because it’s something I can grab a hold of and show you for the purpose to discussion and, in this case, comparison. Stop emailing me to say the numbers are wrong. They’re not. I’m pretty sure I know since I can read contracts in front of me.)

I cooked the numbers there a little bit, but with cause. WVU will actually pay nine offensive assistants next season: Dana Holgorsen, the retained Lonnie Galloway, newly hired Bill Bedenbaugh, Shannon Dawson and Robert Gillespie and dismissed Jeff Mullen, Dave Johnson, Chris Beatty and Dave McMichael.

I’ll counter the uproar with this: It’s collateral damage. If you’re going to make a splash like this, you better displace a whole bunch of water. The change has to work. You need the pieces you need and that means you not only push other pieces off the board, but you pay whatever is asked to acquire the new pieces. The CEO knows this.

So, in theory, WVU is paying nine assistants this season more than half a million dollars more than it paid nine assistants last season. Trouble is WVU will pay 13 offensive and defensive assistants for 2011. Add the four defensive assistants, all making $200,000 or more, and the bill gets to be quite big — $3.425 million.

Figure, too, that Jeff Casteel is in line for a raise that may come close to doubling  his $275,000 base salary, just so he can get comfortable in his new surroundings.

Not sure when that will come. Casteel and all the defensive assistants just finished the first season of their two-year contracts. A lot of money is tied up this season. A lot of money is freed up next season when Mullen, Johnson, Beatty and McMichael come off the books and the defensive staff is eligible for new deals. That  said, would you be  surprised at all if Luck tore up the existing contracts and drew up new ones for the defensive staff? I didn’t think so.