NCAA's Power 5 schools see steep raise in pay for non-revenue coaches

When Debbie Yow took the job as North Carolina State’s athletics director in 2010, the challenges weren’t limited to football and men’s basketball, both of which had been languishing at the bottom of the Atlantic Coast Conference. 

Though any athletics director is judged primarily on the health of those two marquee, money-generating sports, Yow made the case that better performance across the board, even in sports most fans didn’t pay attention to, would establish a culture of competitive excellence throughout the department. 

At that time, Yow was looking for excellence anywhere she could find it. In the points-based, all-sports ranking known as the Directors’ Cup, N.C. State had just finished 89th, directly behind California-Santa Barbara, UNLV and Akron. 

“It’s pretty bad if you’re 89 when there’s only 65 Power Five schools,” Yow said.

In the intervening years, N.C. State changed football and basketball coaches with varying degrees of success. But as new television revenue rolled in from the ACC, she also entered N.C. State into a different kind of arms race happening among Power Five athletics departments by spending significantly more money on coaches in so-called non-revenue sports.

DATABASE: Revenue, expenses for over 200 schools

Across 11 sports that aren’t revenue drivers for N.C. State — men's and women's swimming (which have one head coach), men’s and women’s golf, wrestling, women’s gymnastics, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s tennis and women’s volleyball — Yow hired new coaches during her tenure and increased their combined compensation by nearly 56% between 2013 and 2018.

That’s essentially in line with a nationwide trend.

USA TODAY Sports examined the total compensation each of the Power Five public schools reported paying head coaches in 23 sports other than football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball in 2013 and 2018. Including salaries, benefits and bonuses, the combined compensation for those coaches grew by about 43% over that time.

The rate of increase those schools reported for their football head coaches over that time was almost 51%.

The figures come from schools’ annual financial reports to the NCAA that were compiled in partnership with Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. 

While Yow argued that the increased financial commitment to non-revenue sports (about $750,000 more than in 2013) accounted for only a small slice of an $87 million annual athletics operating budget in 2018, it’s undeniable that the increased commitment has led to more wins. N.C. State rocketed up the Directors’ Cup standings before Yow retired this May, finishing as high as 15th for 2017-18.

“It’s borne out like we wanted it to," Yow said. “It’s made a huge difference.”

But the fact that compensation for coaches in lower-profile, money-losing sports has been growing at a similar rate to football raises red flags for some athletics directors worried about budget crunches and for critics of a collegiate model that largely restricts athletes from receiving anything beyond their scholarship.

A bill in the California legislature that would allow college athletes in the state to make money from their names, images and likenesses, beginning in 2023, has passed the Senate and needs approval from one more committee to reach the Assembly floor. A similar proposal has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who has issued two reports this year examining a range of problems in college sports, told USA TODAY Sports:  “You've got this relatively small handful of money-making sports programs that can credibly justify paying enormous coach salaries based upon the money they make, but that clearly puts a pressure on the schools in the (sports) programs that aren't making money to pay similar salaries. 

“To me, it's fascinating that none of these schools feel any pressure to do better by the kids — that (some) coaches are making 60% more than they were five years ago, and the students haven't gotten a dime in compensation during that time.”

While it’s easy for athletics directors to draw direct lines between football and basketball success and fundamental measurements  like ticket sales and donations, trying to quantify what it means to have a successful swimming or tennis program isn’t as easy beyond the nebulous buzzwords like “winning culture.”

But that hasn’t prevented coaches from reaching some eye-opening pay benchmarks. Including salaries, benefits and bonuses, among them are: 

►The average compensation in softball has increased by an average of almost 62% across the Power Five from 2013 to 2018, with 11 schools paying more than $400,000 and Oklahoma’s Patty Gasso totaling $1.22 million in salary, bonuses and benefits for 2018, when the Sooners advanced to the NCAA Women’s College World Series semifinals.

►Among the eight SEC schools that sponsor women's gymnastics, average coach compensation was $315,860 in 2018. For the other four leagues, the average was $196,068.

►In baseball, the average head coach compensation has increased from $430,228 to $651,445 between 2013 and 2018.

►At least 12 men’s golf coaches totaled more than $300,000 in compensation for 2018, 17 women’s soccer coaches and 10 men’s soccer coaches surpassed $250,000. Additionally, the average paid to wrestling coaches in the Power Five increased by 55% to $266,000.

“Is it a lot of money relative to football and basketball? No, but in many cases it’s four and five times what they were making” just a few years ago, said Chad Chatlos of Ventura Partners, who operates the only major search firm in the college space that frequently handles non-revenue coaching hires. “I’ll work with some ADs who see someone pay a non-revenue coach crazy money and they’ll want to pull their hair out.”

But many of them will end up paying, whether it's hiring an established difference-making coach from another school or keeping a successful coach from leaving.

The question is why. 

Bidding wars

While athletics directors will talk about trying to compete in every sport possible and providing athletes with the best experience possible, there are often other factors in play. Donor influence can play a role, particularly in sports like golf and tennis where boosters will often build close relationships with coaches. Other times, athletics directors would simply rather pay another $30,000 or $50,000 to keep a coach they like rather than enter into a coaching search in a sport where they don’t have expertise.

But there are limits. At a school like Oregon, for instance, having an elite track and field program is of paramount importance to the campus community because of the program's history of winning national championships and producing Olympians, so it makes sense that its coaches are among the highest-paid in the country. 

In 2018, however, Oregon decided not to engage in a bidding war with Texas over softball coach Mike White, who accepted a five-year contract with a starting base salary of $505,000 and guaranteed annual increases of $25,000.

“That was an outlier salary, and we had a very difficult decision to make,” said Rob Mullens, who noted that White’s salary had jumped from $80,000 to $240,000 during his seven years as Oregon’s athletics director. “We felt with our structure we didn’t have the resources to support that type of move.

“It’s difficult to find highly successful coaches, so when you have low supply and high demand, that moves the market. The challenge becomes this: there are certain schools that are willing to move the needle in certain sports and when there’s a big shift (in salary) at the top, that moves everything.”

Even Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne, whose department carried the fourth-largest operating expense budget in FBS in 2018 at $166.5 million, acknowledged that the escalating salaries had directed his recent searches in baseball, rowing, volleyball and swimming away from sitting Power Five head coaches and more toward rising assistants or coaches at the mid-major level. 

Of course, Byrne has also been on the other end of that in sports like men’s and women’s golf, which have both won national titles this decade. Consequently, Alabama has kept suitors away by making them the second-highest and highest-paid Power Five public-school coaches in their respective sports in 2018 at $400,276 and $348,039,including bonuses and benefits.

“We want to reward elite performance, and they’ve done that,” Byrne said.

Agents enter picture

How much to invest in improving non-revenue sports is a question someone like Utah athletics director Mark Harlan is weighing as he enters his second year on the job. Less than a decade removed from competing in the Mountain West Conference, Utah has been able to invest enough resources to put football and men’s basketball on a level playing field within the Pac-12 relatively quickly. Utah also has a unique dynamic with gymnastics, which competes on a national level in every metric, has 14,000 season ticket holders and operates on a close to break-even basis.  

In other areas, though, it’s been a struggle to keep up. This past year, Utah was 79th in the Directors’ Cup (11th among league members) and still lags behind its peers in most non-revenue coaching salaries. But even if Harlan was able to pour more money into non-revenue sports, would Utah be able to catch the likes of perennial national championship contenders like UCLA, Stanford and Oregon in track or women’s soccer? And even if it did, would that resonate like a Pac-12 football title or a Sweet 16 appearance in basketball?  

“Philosophically, that’s a major investment I want to make,” said Harlan, who was indoctrinated into the hyper-competitive Pac-12 Olympic culture as an administrator at Arizona and UCLA. “It’s part of my DNA, and I appreciate those kids just as much as I appreciate everybody else. If we’re trying to get better comprehensively, how do we take our football success and spread that out?”  

Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione said his philosophy in weighing whether to increase investment in a coach is rooted in the growth rate of the sport and the potential for a sport to grow based on youth participation in natural recruiting areas for a school.

For Oklahoma, that’s happened organically in women’s softball under Gasso, who was hired in 1995 from Long Beach State and won her first of four Women’s College World Series titles in 2000. 

But it wasn’t until 2017 — in the wake of national championship No. 4 — that Gasso’s contract smashed norms in her sport. That’s when she signed a deal that more than doubled her basic annual compensation to $925,000, excluding performance bonuses, and guaranteed annual increases of $50,000. In 2018, Gasso’s overall compensation was nearly twice as much as the second-highest paid Power Five public-school coach, Michigan’s Carol Hutchins ($628,213). 

“We can have a conversation about the extraordinary growth of salaries and debate the reasons around it, but the fact of the matter is, it’s happened,” Castiglione said. “To try and identify great coaching talent and recruit them to campus, the marketplace does play a significant role.”

Another factor in that marketplace is the increasing role of coaches’ agents, who’ve seen the salary explosion as a way to build some niche business. 

In college baseball, power agent Rand Sacks represents Florida coach Kevin O’Sullivan among others. Russ Campbell and Patrick Strong of Balch Sports, who represent several high-profile college football coaches including Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, have added a significant portfolio of baseball clients in recent years. 

Dennis Cordell, who started Coaches, Inc., as a firm specializing in football coach representation, has seen his business branch out into dozens of clients across women’s basketball, volleyball, hockey and even track and field. 

“One of the big things we’re doing is just improving the contracts for other sports,” Cordell said. “So many of them aren’t fully guaranteed for the coach or they leave some things up in the air. The way we’ve seen it work out over the last few years is that football leads the way, men's basketball on the business side is usually a year or two behind football, and in these other sports every time a new coach gets a job and has an agent, they’re kind of catching up contractually with what schools are committing to coaches even if the money isn’t the same.”

'You should ... try to win'

Will the spending on these sports slow down? It’s possible, as athletics directors point to flattening revenue trends as a potential sign of trouble. At the same time, the lure of winning remains strong and successful coaches will be marketable to other schools. 

At N.C. State, for instance, many of Yow’s hires came from smaller schools but continually got raises because of performance and interest from other places. 

Wrestling coach Pat Poplozio, for example, was hired from Binghamton in 2012 for $125,000 in guaranteed compensation plus various performance incentives. But after six straight years in the top 20, he’s now under contract through 2025 with a guaranteed base of $269,000 plus $20,000 in potential bonuses tied to academic performance and graduation.  

That’s a significant commitment to make for wrestling, but Yow recalled a conversation early in her tenure with a donor who initially said he only cared about football and basketball. Yow, a former women’s basketball coach, explained that she felt winning would be contagious if it was a department-wide culture where coaches who worked in the same building and sat in the same meetings could challenge and inspire each other. 

“I told him I can’t build a foundation of excellence by giving everything to two sports and then having the other 21 be sad, without,” Yow said. “It creates (a) tremendous sense of jealousy among the 21 for the other two and we’ll never get where we want to go.” 

Years later, Yow recalled, that same donor e-mailed her asking if the cheerleading team winning a national championship earned N.C. State any Directors’ Cup points. That made her smile. 

“The sense of pride in finishing No. 15 last year was real. It’s real,” Yow said. “So all I know is if you’re going to wear the school’s name across the jersey, you should probably try to win.”

Contributing: John Kelly, Tom Schad

Follow Steve Berkowitz on Twitter @ByBerkowitz, Dan Wolken @DanWolken and Tess DeMeyer @tess_demeyer