Rick Barnes is in Knoxville for the long haul after opting to stay at Tennessee over an offer to coach at UCLA. The Bruins came after Barnes with an offer of five million per year, but couldn’t ever get past his reported five million dollar buyout.
Barnes confirmed that the buyout was the snag that kept him in Knoxville today.
“When you get down to a situation like this, it has to make sense from a financial standpoint,” Barnes said in a press conference on Tuesday. “The bottomline is, we (Barnes and UCLA) just really couldn’t work it out with the buyout.