SMQ: How much money do college football coaches actually make?

College football coaches make more money than ever before. This week’s SMQ examines what some of the best have made over the course of their careers.

If you have followed this column over the years or listened to the Saturday Blitz Podcast since it launched two months ago, you have certainly heard plenty about where I stand on the distribution of revenue in college football. Players are shut out of an ever-growing pie of riches, while coaches get ever fatter on the gluttony of income that must be spent.

The men who bring together talent to play a game are rendered millionaires dozens of times over, while those recruits get a scholarship that may or may not actually allow them to study what they want and some (but often not all) of the money they will need to survive while attending school and working at the craft of college football.

We hear about coaches signing bigger and bigger contracts, but it is harder to pin down precisely how much each man at the helm of a college football program actually nets for his troubles. It is a question that needs to be asked, however, especially when coaches have a propensity for touting the glories of amateurism while getting paid handsomely for doing so.

It is this subject of lifetime coaching pay that has me thinking on this Sunday morning over morning coffee. So let’s dive in for this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback and try to break down how much coaches actually make over the course of a career in college football.

A quick note on the source material

The estimates compiled for the lifetime head coaching earnings of the various coaches listed below have relied on a variety of data sources to come to these ultimately conservative conclusions. Where no definitive figure is available, I have opted to go with the lower end of estimated earning scales.

One of the most valuable resources is USA Today’s annual compilation of college football coaching salaries. For salaries prior to the start of USA Today’s data aggregation in 2007, various media resources from the period have been drawn upon to assemble an assessment of what the top dogs of programs bring home annually.

Without a massive bombardment of Freedom of Information Act requests, it will be hard to definitively parse out what head coaches make in their lifetime on college football sidelines. But this week’s SMQ aims to make the best estimate available from the accessible data.

How much has Nick Saban made as a college football head coach?

The man who many would classify as the greatest head coach in college football history has enjoyed a long and varied career as the head of various programs. Nick Saban has now spent the better part of three different decades making his money from the intercollegiate game. Those years in the sport at the college level have paid handsomely all along the way.

Saban’s head coaching career started way back in 1990, when he landed the Toledo Rockets job. It nearly started a few years earlier, when Saban was passed up for the opportunity to lead his alma mater down the road at Kent State.

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In one year, Saban took the Rockets from back-to-back 6-5 seasons to a 9-2 finish. Finding accurate data about how much Saban was paid by Toledo has proved difficult, but we can gauge a likely range based on other comparables from the era.

Big Ten schools made in the range of $200,000, while Florida State’s Bobby Bowden was pulling down $700,000 a few years before the Seminoles left behind independence for the ACC. At a MAC program employing a first-time head coach, Saban was probably pulling down somewhere between $80,000 and $120,000 per year in that first contract.

If we consider the low end of that scale, it pushes Saban just over $85 million earned from college football just as a head coach. After spending four seasons as Bill Belichick’s defensive coordinator with the Cleveland Browns, Saban took a job at Michigan State in 1995 that paid just under $700,000 per year. His five seasons in East Lansing yielded around $3.5 million.

Then LSU came calling, offering up $1.2 million per year in his initial contract for the 2000 season. After winning the 2004 BCS national championship with the Tigers, Saban’s contract was nearly doubled to $2.3 million. At that point it looked like Saban would be a lifer in Baton Rouge as LSU evolved into the beast of the SEC West.

Instead, Saban left to try his hand at coaching in the NFL. After two seasons and a 15-17 record with the Miami Dolphins, the coach opted to head back to college to take the Alabama job. Since then, Saban has pulled down more than $60 million as the top-paid public employee not just in the Yellowhammer State but also across the entire United States.

That $85 million estimate over a quarter-century of coaching college football does not include bonuses based on reaching measurable benchmarks. Add that in, and Saban is edging ever closer to $100 million in lifetime earnings in college football.

Saban’s six national titles earned at LSU and Alabama make him a worthwhile investment. Not every coach produces Saban-like results, however, yet coaching salaries hardly skew on a hard curve from Saban’s high mark.

The case of Kirk Ferentz: What does tenure get you as a head coach?

It is becoming increasingly rare these days to watch a head coach last at one school and one school only over the course of his career. Even past legends like Bear Bryant and Bobby Bowden coached elsewhere before making their biggest waves at Alabama and Florida State respectively. But when someone does become a lasting institution at their institution, it is worth celebrating in a sport that prioritizes victories over loyalties.

That said, it also amounts to incredible wealth to have such job security. We see this in the case of Kirk Ferentz, the longest-tenured individual among the 130 FBS head coaches. Since succeeding Hayden Fry as the leader of the Hawkeyes in 1999, Ferentz has enjoyed the support of the Iowa athletic department and the university administration to the tune of more than $50 million.

Though Ferentz has lasted two decades and counting in Iowa City, it is worth noting that he wasn’t even the first choice of many of the Hawkeyes fan base. After his first few years leading Iowa, his first two teams had gone 4-19 while Bob Stoops — the alumnus that the Hawkeyes allowed to get away to Oklahoma — won a national title in his second season leading the Sooners. The university still signed Ferentz to a new contract after that second year.

Eventually things turned around, though, as Ferentz won 31 games between 2002 and 2004. That still represents the high-water mark of his tenure, though, as the Hawkeyes have only reached double digits in the win column twice more during the past decade-plus and have only one division title to their name in that span.

Ferentz has renegotiated his contract several times over the years, most recently in 2016, and he is locked in at the university until 2025 if he opts to keep coaching that long. Also built into his contract is a sweetheart deal that effectively allows Ferentz’s son Brian to groom as the head-coach-in-waiting.

In a way, this nepotistic behavior is nothing more than pulling up the ladder of opportunity as the Hawkeyes allow Ferentz to keep his decisions and the line of succession in the family. It is a privilege that is borne out of becoming the wealthiest public employee in the state by many magnitudes.

Dabo Swinney and the power of winning on paychecks

It wouldn’t be a complete discussion about college football coaches and the topic of remuneration if we failed to include Dabo Swinney. The two-time national championship-winning coach at Clemson has famously talked about how he would walk away from college football if players started receiving more than the university equivalent of arcade coins or company scrip for their efforts on the gridiron.

Of course, when you have banked nearly $40 million in salary and bonuses as a head coach in just one decade at the helm of a program, it is really easy to consider walking away and never doing another thing again. That is the privilege that comes with big paychecks and a business model that pays some laborers handsomely and treats others like indentured servants.

Swinney, it is worth noting, is the rare breed of coach who successfully negotiated through an interim tag and elevated the program in the process. Usually, such tags lead programs to overreach when they hand out a full-time contract. But at a school where Clemsoning very recently meant something very different than it does now, Swinney has done an incredible job of changing the narrative for the Tigers.

In his inaugural season following the removal of the interim tag, Swinney made just over $800,000. He has banked seven figures each year since, with the total amount eight times higher per year than when Swinney landed the full-time gig.

In his latest contract extension, Swinney looks to become even more wealthy beyond his needs over the next decade. While money in the hands of his student-athletes would apparently be a major demotivator for Swinney, padding his already-fattened bank account seems to have no such equivalent effect. If he remains in South Carolina through the length of the contract, Swinney will generate an additional $93 million for his personal coffers.

In college football, finding coaches who can thrive in a specific campus culture is critical. Swinney has proven without a doubt that he is expert at navigating the Clemson system to produce results. As his assistants also bump up into the seven-figure range of annual salaries, though, it exposes further the lie that athletic departments do not have the money to pay players.

Final thoughts about coaches and their salaries

At the FBS level, we have seen revenues explode in the 21st century thanks to a variety of factors. The negotiation of ever-larger television contracts by conferences has certainly skewed the quantity of money available to athletic departments. Further, the introduction of the Bowl Championship Series and then the College Football Playoff has provided even more money to programs.

Among Power Five schools, the average head coaching salary per year is now more than $3.8 million. At this point, only four Power Five coaches — Oregon State’s Jonathan Smith, Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson, Indiana’s Tom Allen, and California’s Justin Wilcox — bring home less than $2 million per season.

In addition, 18 coaches at the Group of Five level make at least $1 million per year. Seven figures, at this point, is the norm rather than an outlier at the FBS level.

What this says, in the end, is that the money is there to fund whatever a program wants to buy if the will is there to spend the money. When people bemoan the poverty inherent in intercollegiate athletics, or cry about how non-revenue sports would dry up if a school paid its players in revenue sports, the pay at the top exposes the lie in the myth.