Why college football is the most lucrative sport for coaches, even at prestigious basketball schools

Sports discovered that the average head coach salary for public universities in the Power Five conferences will be $6.2 million this year, a staggering 14.8% increase from 2022.
Since the day he was hired to lead the state’s premier men’s basketball program in 2009, John Calipari had been the highest-paid governmental employee in the state of Kentucky.

But things have changed this year.

Calipari just gave up his salary dominance to Mark Stoops, the football coach of the Wildcats, after nearly 14 years of dominance.

In November, Stoops, who has been the head coach at Kentucky since 2013, inked a substantial contract extension, thereby giving him a 33% pay hike and bringing his annual salary to $9 million.

Calipari, who is the highest-paid coach in college hoops, is due to make $8.5 million this year.

In a statement announcing Stoops’ renewal, Kentucky’s athletic director Mitch Barnhart remarked that “continuity has become more and more important in today’s landscape.”

And there is no doubt: The terrain has changed.

Nowadays, college football still reigns supreme at hoops-obsessed campuses like Kentucky, at least in terms of coaching compensation.

The public universities in the Power Five conferences will pay their head coaches an average of $6.2 million this year, according to USA TODAY Sports’ annual analysis of college football coaches’ pay, which was published on Tuesday. This represents an enormous 14.3% increase from 2022 among institutions that were in the Power Five in both years.

Additionally, it is almost twice as much as the average wage ($3.35 million) that those same schools gave their men’s basketball head coaches in 2022–2023. Men’s basketball is the second main revenue-generating sport.
“University presidents opted to adopt the pro model when it comes to football coach compensation at the highest level. According to Amy Privette Perko, the CEO of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a group that monitors college sports, “everything else is governed using a different model. And, to be really honest, that is what is causing the model to fall apart at the seams.

It may not come as a surprise that the head football coach is now earning more money than his men’s basketball counterpart at the majority of Power Five schools given the football-driven increase in conference television rights payments and the impending signing of a new agreement for College Football Playoff rights. But according to data, even at schools like Kentucky, North Carolina, and UCLA, which have established a reputation as college basketball’s “blue bloods,” the gap has really grown to resemble a chasm.

Every public school program that has won a national championship in men’s basketball since the NCAA tournament’s expansion in has had its school pay figures for the head football and men’s basketball coaches compiled .

The data shows that in 2010, men’s basketball coaches at those 15 schools made $10.3 million more, cumulatively, than their football counterparts. This year, they are due to make $18.8 million less.

Only Arizona and Connecticut, out of the 15 institutions, pay their men’s basketball coach more than their football coach.

“You have to overpay for a truly good coach if you want him. According to Craig Robinson, the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, football appears to be ready and eager to overpay. I hardly ever observe that in basketball.