Richard Pryor once famously joked that “cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money.” In the SEC, the proof of that is in coaching salaries.
… When Saban took over at Alabama in 2007, he was one of four college football coaches pulling down more than $3 million per season, joining then Florida coach Urban Meyer, Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops and Texas’ Mack Brown as the highest paid coaches in the game.
Fast forward to 2011 and five SEC coaches — Saban, LSU’s Les Miles, Arkansas’ Bobby Petrino, Auburn’s Gene Chizik and Florida’s Will Muschamp — eclipsed the $3 million mark.
That’s not five in all of college football. That’s five in the SEC alone.
Four other league coaches — Georgia’s Mark Richt, South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier, now ex-Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt and Mississippi State’s Dan Mullen — earned more than $2.5 million in 2011.
While big ticket coaches dominate headlines, most striking, to me, at least, are the salaries of some of the league’s sub-.500 coaches.
At Tennessee, Derek Dooley has a base salary of $2.1 million per season. Meanwhile, Joker Phillips is clocking $1.7 million per at basketball-crazed Kentucky.
Both enter their third seasons on the job with identical 11-14 records.
By my count, every coach in the SEC West earned north of two and a half million dollars last season. It was a good division, but it wasn’t that good.
Get The Picture 
I’ll take “Misallocation of Resources for $1000, Alex”
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I said at the time, why does Tenn have to pay the La Tech coach quadruple to get him to move over? You don’t think SOD would’ve come over for maybe double? And you know what the worst part is…..the schools commit to multi year contracts regardless of what the coach produces. I actually think Saban has earned every dollar but everybody isn’t Saban, even if they “discipled” under him. IDK….just so many ways to put that money to better use…..it’s more sad than anything else to me.
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Jimmy Sexton gotta get paid!
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It’s the one-upmanship folly that’s sickening about it.
“We pay our coach more so that makes him better and you are poor”
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Money is God’s way of telling you that you have too much fan worship.
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Even funnier, 12 years ago when LSU hired Saban for $1.5 mill a year it made him one of the top 5 highest paid in the whole country.
And some people in the state thought that was an obscene amount to pay at the time.
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Basically that was the start of the coaches’ salary inflation, at least in the SEC.
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Inflation? Reminds me of that Bama shirt I saw once that said ‘Who says money can’t buy happiness?’
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You’re confused Z. It was an Auburn shirt and it said: “Who says money can’t buy players?”
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That coupled with new coaches like Bob Stoops, Larry Coker and Jim Tressel winning titles quickly. They commanded big money almost instantly, and then when it came to Saban and LSU, Jimmy Sexton came up with the infamous “1 dollar more than the highest-paid coach” contract clause.
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