Hamilton said having enough money to assemble the right staff was one of Kiffin’s biggest priorities when they talked about the job.

“This is a true team player,” Hamilton said of his new hire. “What he talked to me about was that, ‘If I’m going to succeed and we’re going to succeed, it’s about having the right people around me. I want to hire the best possible staff I can hire, a staff that everybody in college football looks at and says, ‘Oh my gosh How did Tennessee put that staff together?’ It even goes as far as there are a couple of places in his contract that talks about if he wins SEC Coach of the Year or national coach of the year and what he would get for that, and he came back to us and said I don’t want that. I want that to be split among the staff. He recognizes the staff will have a great deal to do with the success.”

That second article you link has a lot of good quotes about the whole thing. There was a lot of emphasis on throwing money at Monte and Ed. Hamilton approached the salaries as a zero-sum game:

“First of all, ultimately I look at the salary pool – the head coach and assistant coaches – as a line item in our budget,” Hamilton said. "At a lot of institutions, the model is the head coach is making a significantly higher salary than anybody else on his staff.

So to toss money at assistants, it had to come from the pool of money for other coaches. They couldn’t exactly reduce the normal pay scale for the other assistants (and hope to get anybody decent), so the money had to come from the salary that Kiffin might normally have made.

We’ve been down this road before. The model really is a different mode. No, we weren’t in the negotiating room, but neither was he. We have to also remember that Kiffin’s extremely young and he has a lot of time to make his money. If he wins championships early, he’ll be making bank for a long, long time. It’s a reasonable stance to think that Kiffin would think long-term on this one.

They have set themselves up in this, so that they cannot be refuted until after the fact.

Tell you what – if Junior or Chizik gets off to a roaring start and turns down the large raise that we all know will follow from that so that his assistants can be properly rewarded in the wake of success, I’ll issue a big time mea culpa about this post. But I wouldn’t hold my breath that it’ll be necessary to apologize.

It can’t be refuted, instead they set up parameters to refute it after success or failure when the season begins.

The real insinuation is this:

They were offered the money they were offered because that’s what was justified by their respective resumes. In both cases, those resumes were considerably thinner than those of the men they were replacing.

That they didn’t deserve the salaries that they were supposedly offered. Basically, they are speculating and creating a scenario that Kiffin had no choice in his current salary, that Hamilton dictated he would take this salary. None of us were in that meeting, only Kiffin and Hamilton. Thus it can’t be refuted. I could create any number of scenarios of how those meeting went down, and there would be little to nothing you could do to disprove it because its heresay.