Dave Hart was the athletic director at East Carolina during the late 1980s and early 1990s when he conceived a fairly novel idea that indirectly wound up putting $4 million in West Virginia's bank account.

Fearing that then-ECU football coach Bill Lewis might suddenly jump to a larger program, Hart and his school's lawyers wrote a penalty clause into Lewis' contract. It stipulated that should he take another job before having worked five years for the Pirates, he would have to reimburse the school for his departure.

That sum turned out to be $380,000, which Lewis took out a loan to fork over, after having led the 1991 Pirates to an 11-1 record, a No. 9 national ranking, a landmark Peach Bowl win over N.C. State (which finished 9-3 under Dick Sheridan) and a decision to accept an offer from Georgia Tech.

West Virginia, 16 years later, had a similar strategy in place for an abrupt departure by Rich Rodriguez. After leading the Mountaineers to a 10-2 record before its bowl last season, the one-time Clemson offensive coordinator exited for Michigan. West Virginia invoked the small print in his contract, and its coach and his new school accepted a $4 million settlement in the Mountaineers' favor.

Hart, who went from ECU to Florida State in 1995 and now works as an assistant AD at Alabama, said in an interview that the penalty payment in the Lewis' contract was more the result of necessity than innovation.

"At that time, ECU had too much of a swinging door in the football office," Hart said. "We really weren't doing anything more than trying to find ways to keep our football coaches for at least five years, so we more or less wanted that penalty clause written in. But in Bill's defense, he didn't disagree at all. He was on board with it all the way. He completely understood our desire for program continuity."

Hart said that what was then an unusual aspect of coaching contracts since has become standard.

"We weren't the first ones out of the gate on that front, and it certainly wasn't some stroke of genius on our part," Hart said. "These days, I think a lot more coaches have to agree to those kind of clauses than don't.

"But for us back then, it was all a defensive mechanism -- an insurance policy is probably a good way to put it. I really can't remember exactly how we settled on the specific figure. But ECU had been losing very good coaches to more visible programs for way too long. We were determined to do everything in our power to keep our coaches."

The pending new contract for current ECU coach Skip Holtz will not include an expensive penalty exit clause, Pirates AD Terry Holland said Friday.

"There'll be a stipulation of some sort in that regard, but it'll be very minimal unless Skip wants something that's more financially binding in the way of buyouts for both parties -- for him and for the school," Holland said. "It certainly won't be anything remotely close to the sum I've seen reported in the situation involving West Virginia and coach Rodriguez."

Hart and Lewis, now a member of the Notre Dame staff, remain close friends.

"When he left for Tech, I understood perfectly," Hart said. "I did everything in my power to talk him into staying, and I think we actually had [wife] Sandy in our corner. But Georgia Tech was a powerful lure. They had won a part of the national championship in 1990, so how could you have said 'No' to that? But at the same time, my job was to protect the best interests of ECU. We needed, for several reasons, to enforce the provisions of the contract."

Lewis didn't survive his third season in Atlanta. After going 5-6 in' 92 and '93, he was fired and replaced by George O'Leary about midway through '94.

Hart replaced Lewis with assistant Steve Logan, who agreed to the same contractual clause and stayed aboard until he was fired by another administrative regime after the 2002 season.

West Virginia could be tracking along the same path. When Rodriguez left, the school turned to aide Bill Stewart, whose first team takes a 1-0 record into the Pirates' Dowdy-Ficklen today. Rodriguez's first game at Michigan resulted in a deflating loss to Utah. Thinking it was buying a big winner, Michigan agreed to chip in $2.5 million toward Rodriguez' escape. So, who's laughing all the way to the bank now?

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