Skyrocketing Salaries: An Examination of College Football Coach Compensation
The world of college football is known for its passionate fans, intense rivalries, and, increasingly, its exorbitant spending. NCAA football programs are awash with cash, and they are distributing it widely, from coaches to their assistants to players (through NIL deals and other means). While the sums may seem staggering, they reflect the current landscape of college football.
The Escalating Pay Scale
Salaries for college football's top coaches continue to rise with no end in sight. The highest paid college football coach makes over $11 million a year. The figures are jaw-dropping, but when programs have that kind of money, they may as well spend it on top talent as they chase a national championship. Some of the substantial paychecks are worth it. As firings and buyouts increase, it’s clear some are not.
Each year, USA Today Sports requests head coach compensation forms from all 131 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision.
Top-Earning Coaches: A Snapshot
Here's a glimpse at some of the highest-paid head coaches in college football, with figures reflecting the 2025-2026 season and beyond:
Curt Cignetti (Indiana): Following Indiana’s 2025 national championship, a 16-0 undefeated run, and the program’s first title, Cignetti's salary soared to $13.2 million annually through 2033. Per an ESPN source, Curt Cignetti has agreed to a new deal at Indiana that pushes his annual salary up to $13.2 million. The new deal pays $105 million in total, $13.2 million annually through 2033, and includes a projected $14 million in total compensation, including performance bonuses. Indiana acted quickly to secure its future by restructuring Cignetti's deal three times in just two seasons. He now sits alongside Georgia's Kirby Smart as the highest-paid coach in the nation. The contract includes a unique escalator clause that ensures he remains among the top three highest-paid coaches. This safeguard was triggered after Indiana reached the College Football Playoff semifinals and eventually won the title. Cignetti's rise from earning less than $700,000 at James Madison to $13.2 million at Indiana is a historic financial jump.
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Kirby Smart (Georgia): Kirby Smart became college football’s first $13 million coach with a 10-year, $130 million extension through 2033. The former Georgia defensive back and Alabama defensive coordinator officially settled in Athens in 2015 as the Bulldogs’ head coach. Since then, Kirby Smart has collected back-to-back national titles in 2021 and 2022, two SEC championships, five SEC Eastern Division titles, and seven bowl game victories. Out of their last 34 games, the Bulldogs have won 33. Smart was named SEC Coach of the Year twice in a five-year span and has received several other coach of the year honors.
Ryan Day (Ohio State): Day earns $12.6 million annually under a seven-year deal through 2031, with a $12 million base salary and up to $1.55 million in bonuses. Ryan Day has been in the coaching game for 22 years - seven years with the Buckeyes and five as the team’s head coach. With Day at the helm, Ohio State has achieved 23 consecutive wins in Big Ten games. Plus, they were the only program to qualify for the playoffs three times since 2019. Day has coached 18 first-team All-Americans, five Heisman Trophy finalists, and nine first-round NFL Draft picks, including three Ohio state starting quarterbacks since 2019. In 2019, Day became the first Ohio State coach in 40 years to earn the title of Big Ten Conference Coach of the Year.
Mike Elko (Texas A&M): Mike Elko currently ranks No. 10 with a $7 million base from his previous deal, but his new six-year, $69 million extension starts at $10.75 million in 2026, rising to $12.25 million by 2031.
Dabo Swinney (Clemson): The former Oklahoma coach signed a 10-year, $110 million contract in 2022. The Tigers welcomed Dabo Swinney to Death Valley as a wide receiver coach back in 2003, and they haven’t looked back since. Since 2009, Swinney has served as Clemson’s head coach, leading the Tigers to eight Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) championships and two CFP national titles. In 17 out of his 20 seasons coaching at Clemson, a Tiger wide receiver earned All-ACC status. Swinney has taken home national coach of the year honors from at least one organization in five of the past nine years.
Brent Venables (Oklahoma): Brent Venables and his staff will receive significant raises after the Sooners went 10-2 last season and earned a CFP berth.
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Mario Cristobal (Miami): Mario Cristobal’s 10-year, $80 million contract averages $8 million annually, with his 2026 base salary hitting $8.3-$8.5 million, ranking him tied for sixth among CFP coaches.
Billy Napier (Florida): Billy Napier’s 2025 salary was $7.4 million under his original seven-year.
Factors Influencing Coaching Salaries
Success on the field is a major determinant of a coach's salary. Coaches who consistently lead their teams to winning seasons, conference championships, and national titles are highly sought after and command top dollar. Other factors include:
Revenue Generation: High-achieving football programs in large conferences generate substantial revenue through ticket sales, alumni contributions, sponsorships, and more. This financial success allows universities to offer lucrative contracts to attract and retain top coaching talent.
Market Demand: The coaching market is competitive, and universities often engage in bidding wars to secure the services of successful coaches. This drives up salaries, as schools are willing to pay a premium to gain a competitive edge.
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Negotiation Skills: Coaches with strong negotiation skills and representation can often secure more favorable contracts, including higher salaries, performance bonuses, and other perks.
The Financial Ecosystem of College Football
Even though colleges do not always make money from athletics, high-achieving football programs in large conferences rake in a ton of profit. Revenue combines contributions from alumni, sports camps, state and government support, ticket sales, and signage and other sponsorships. Since the 1800s, football has by far been the top-earning college sport. On average, a university will bring in more revenue from football than it will from the next 35 most-profitable sports combined. The universities with the highest-paid coaches in college football collectively made over $543 million in the 2021-2022 season. Even after factoring in team expenses, from equipment to recruitment efforts, coaches are still paid out in a big way.
Coaching Bonuses and Incentives
A college football coach typically has a unique contract that lays out the base salary, supplemental compensation - essentially, the money a coach can make from using their name, image, or likeness for sponsorship deals or apparel contracts - and last but not least, bonuses and incentives. There are hundreds of different ways a coach can earn bonuses. Coaches can earn extra cash for bowl game appearances and wins, coach of the year recognition, increases in game attendance or season ticket purchases, and even team academic performance. For example, if Nick Saban, head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, wins the SEC championship, he will make an additional $125,000. If Brian Kelly’s LSU Tigers score a high enough Academic Progress Rate (APR), he can cash in an additional $50,000. And if Mel Tucker’s team brought home the national championship trophy, he would rake in an extra $500,000. But even the highest-paid college football coaches are only actually making a fraction of their potential bonuses. Jim Harbaugh, head coach of the Michigan Wolverines, earned the highest bonus of any college football coach this season at $2.2 million.
Is It Worth It? A Question of Value
The substantial salaries paid to college football coaches raise important questions about the value they bring to their institutions. While a successful coach can elevate a program, generate revenue, and enhance a university's reputation, the high cost of their compensation may raise concerns.
Resource Allocation: Critics argue that the money spent on coaching salaries could be better allocated to academic programs, student scholarships, or other institutional priorities.
Performance Expectations: With such high salaries, coaches face immense pressure to deliver results. Failure to meet expectations can lead to firings and costly buyouts, further straining university finances.
The Impact of NIL: It is important to emphasize right now that athletic departments do not currently have money to pay athletes a wage. Colleges and universities are non-profit organizations. This means, as the name obviously implies, there are no profits. Whatever money is brought into the organization is spent on the mission of the organization (or whatever the decision-makers decide is the mission). So, when you hear someone say “college sports aren’t profitable,” you shouldn’t be surprised. Non-profits don’t have profits. All of this means that right now there is no money to meet a new expense. Whatever money the schools have earned from college sports in the past has been spent. Many athletic directors have made it clear what different choices they would like to make. In a recent article by Chase Goodbread in USA Today, athletic directors indicated they would like to cut sports played by men and women that don’t currently generate the revenue we see in football and men’s college basketball.
A Shifting Landscape
College athletics are most definitely changing. For more than a century, the NCAA has maintained absolute control over the athletes’ labor market and restricted their pay to only a scholarship. But it appears that soon athletes will be paid a share of the revenue that college sports generate. Let’s talk about the pay of football coaches in the professional and college ranks. According to Front Office Sports, the average pay of the twenty highest paid NFL head coaches is $8.98 million. This result should strike everyone as very odd. At least, it is odd if we think about how women are paid in sports. This summer Nefertiti Walker and I published a book on women’s sports called Slaying the Trolls. In this book we discuss the pay of Dawn Staley. In her career coaching women’s basketball, Staley has led the University of South Carolina to three national titles. In 2022, South Carolina signed Staley to a new seven-year contract that will pay her on average $3.2 million per year. As we note in Slaying the Trolls, this amount matched what Frank Martin was paid by South Carolina to coach its men’s basketball team in 2020-21. Martin was fired in 2021 after ten years where he never came close to winning any titles anywhere. Of course, we know why Staley’s pay doesn’t seem to reflect how much better she is at her job. The revenues in women’s college basketball simply don’t match the revenues in men’s college basketball. Apparently in the world of football, this story is very, very wrong. Revenues for the NFL and college football are most definitely not the same. According to Forbes, the 32 teams in the NFL in 2023 averaged $581 million in revenue. So, an average NFL team has more than five times the revenue of the average college football team. But the top head coaches get paid the same in both places. How is that possible? The highest paid people employed by the NFL are the players. Dan Campbell might be an amazing coach for the Detroit Lions. But if Jared Goff (the team’s $53 million starting quarterback) were replaced by Nate Sudfeld (one of the team’s back-up quarterbacks), Campbell would not look like a great coach anymore.
It’s a different story in college football. Once again, the NCAA has historically restricted the labor market for players. It has been a different story, though, for the coaches. For a century people been okay with schools monopsonistically exploiting athletes. That free labor market, though, was impacted by the exploitation of the athletes. Because athletes weren’t getting cash, there was always a much bigger pile of cash for the coaches. And that meant there has been enough cash for colleges to pay their football coaches like they were NFL coaches. To be clear, the revenues in college never justified those huge paychecks for the coaches. Yet that never mattered. As we note in Slaying the Trolls, when it comes to sports, men really love men. But now it should be a different story. Now that players can be paid, a school like Clemson University should be making very different choices. In 2022 (the latest year we have data), Clemson reported football revenues of $74 million. The same school paid Dabo Swinney, its head football coach, $11.5 million. Going forward, Clemson shouldn’t be giving 16 percent of its revenue to one coach. This is because Clemson will soon discover that Swinney isn’t really that great of a coach if he doesn’t have the very best players. One suspects that highly paid football coaches will object to this story. In fact, Mike Gundy recently asked his players to stop asking for more money now that fall practices have started. But despite Gundy’s objections, the players will keep asking for more money. The revenues from college football simply don’t justify the salaries currently paid to the head football coaches. So, when it comes time to add that wage expense for players, athletic directors should start looking at the pay of their coaches.
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