Why college football is king in coaching pay − even at blue blood basketball schools

John Calipari had been the highest-paid public employee in the state of Kentucky since the day he was hired to coach the state's flagship men's basketball program in 2009.

But this year, that's changed. 

After being the state’s top earner for nearly 14 years running, Calipari recently ceded his salary crown to the Wildcats' football coach, Mark Stoops.

Stoops, who has been at Kentucky since 2013, signed a mammoth contract extension in November that effectively gave him a 33% raise, bumping his pay up to $9 million annually. Calipari, who is the highest-paid coach in college hoops, is due to make $8.5 million this year.

"Continuity has become more and more important in today’s landscape," Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart said in a statement announcing Stoops’ extension. 

And make no mistake: That landscape has shifted. 

Now, even at hoops-crazed universities such as Kentucky, college football is king − at least when it comes to coaching pay.

As part of its annual analysis of college football coaches' compensation published Tuesday, USA TODAY Sports found that the public schools in the Power Five conferences will pay their head coaches an average of $6.2 million this year − which marks a whopping 14.3% increase from 2022, among schools that were in the Power Five in both years.

It's also nearly double the average salary ($3.35 million) that those same schools paid their head coaches in men's basketball, the other major revenue-generating sport, in 2022-23.

“When it comes to football coaching salaries at the top level, university presidents decided that they would follow the pro model. Everything else is structured in a different model," said Amy Privette Perko, the chief executive officer of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a college sports watchdog organization. "And frankly, that’s what’s causing the model to rip apart at the seams."

With a football-fueled surge in conference television rights payments, and a new deal for College Football Playoff rights on the horizon, it may come as no surprise that the head football coach is now making more money than his men's basketball counterpart at most Power Five schools. But data indicates that gap has actually become more like a gulf − even at schools like Kentucky, North Carolina and UCLA, which have built a reputation as college basketball's “blue bloods.”

USA TODAY Sports compiled school pay figures for the head football and men's basketball coaches at a select group of schools with a rich tradition in hoops − every public-school program that has won a national title in men’s hoops since the expansion of the NCAA tournament in 1985. 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 two of the 15 schools − Arizona and Connecticut − are paying the men's basketball coach more than the football coach.

"If you want a really good coach, you have to overpay for him. And football seems to be ready and willing to overpay," said Craig Robinson, the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. "I don’t necessarily see that in basketball."

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How football coaches passed basketball coaches at blue blood programs

While billions of dollars flow through the college sports industry each year, the overwhelming majority of that money is driven by just two sports: Football and men's basketball. Because they generate the most revenue, these programs are often first in line for facility upgrades, new technology and other on-campus resources.

In some cases, particularly with regards to facilities, this can lead to tension. Last year, for instance, Kentucky's board of trustees signed off on a $25 million renovation to the football team's indoor facility. A few months later, Calipari decided to go public with his longstanding plea for the school to make a similar investment into a new practice facility for basketball. In an interview with The Athletic, he made his case by stating a widespread perception as a matter of fact − that Kentucky, with its eight national championships in men's hoops, is "a basketball school."

"It’s always been that," he told the media outlet. "Alabama is a football school. So is Georgia. I mean, they are. No disrespect to our football team. I hope they win 10 games and go to bowls. ... But this is a basketball school."

Within a matter of hours, Calipari's characterization prompted backlash from Stoops, who was coming off a successful 2021 season. The football coach jabbed back at Calipari on social media, sparking an uncomfortable public tiff between the Wildcats' two most prominent (and well-paid) employees.

"Basketball school? I thought we competed in the SEC?" he wrote, adding the hashtag "#4straightpostseasonwins."

Some schools have historically had more success in one of those sports than the other, or prioritized them differently − leading to the "football school" and "basketball school" labels that Calipari referenced. And for years, their investment in coaching, and head coach salaries, reflected that.

In 2010, for example, Indiana men's basketball coach Tom Crean made more than three times as much as football coach Bill Lynch − which is hardly a shock, given Crean's experience and the Hoosiers' pedigree on the court. Rick Pitino's salary at Louisville similarly (and unsurprisingly) dwarfed that of its newly-hired football coach, Charlie Strong. Ditto for Bill Self at Kansas, and Calipari at Kentucky.

For the better part of the following decade, at those schools and others, it's been more of the same − even as coaches in both sports departed or were fired for poor performance. But in recent years, the trend flipped. In 2020, Indiana started paying Tom Allen more than Archie Miller. And this year, for the first time, the football coaches at Kansas, Kentucky and Louisville are scheduled to make more from the school than Self, Calipari and Kenny Payne, respectively. (At Kansas, a one-time signing bonus of $750,000 tipped the scales for football coach Lance Leipold.)

Rick Smith, an agent who represents coaches in both sports, said there's a very simple explanation for this shift: Revenue.

"Football’s the front door," said Smith, the president of the coaching division at Priority Sports. "There’s a few outlier schools where basketball has had a better record or program, per se − but at the end of the day, if the football program gets good, it’ll blow (basketball) away."

School officials are wary to discuss the differences in pay between their football and men's basketball coaches. USA TODAY Sports requested interviews with athletic directors and/or head football and basketball coaches at each of the 15 schools that have won a national title in men's hoops, including Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky and Louisville. Eight declined those requests through athletic department spokespeople, while seven did not respond to repeated follow-ups.

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Where schools find revenue to boost football salaries

For retired athletic director Tom Jurich, there was never much concern about the salaries he doled out to coaches, or how they compared to one another. In his 20 years at Louisville, he said, football and men's basketball were the school's "bread and butter," so he tried to hire the best coaches he could find in each and make the finances work.

"We made sure that everybody had everything that they needed," said Jurich, who was pushed out by Louisville in 2017 amid a pay-for-play scandal in basketball but later reached a settlement with the school that recast his departure as a resignation without cause. "I never really looked and said 'I’m going to pull from one to do something for somebody else.’ I looked at every sport separately."

Jurich also said coaches' salaries weren't tied to the revenue generated by their programs − though, at other schools, that is at least partially the case. Smith, the agent, said salaries are usually a function of the overall budget for a particular sport. The bigger the budget, the greater potential for a sizable coaching salary.

All of this, of course, comes against the complicated backdrop of how different sports generate revenue − which, at least at the Power Five level, revolves almost entirely around TV.

With football, each of the Power Five conferences gets a slice of the CFP's annual revenue − around $600 million − in addition to the money from their own television rights deals, where football is believed to account for roughly 80% of the value. That translates to approximately $1.8 billion in football-driven TV revenue for the Power Five conferences in the 2022 fiscal year, according to federal tax records − money that is ultimately divvied up between just 64 schools.

Meanwhile, in men's basketball, the primary money-maker is the NCAA tournament, colloquially known as March Madness. But the television revenue for that event, which was just under $870 million in the 2022 fiscal year, runs through the NCAA rather than the conferences. Some of it helps fund the association itself, while the rest is ultimately spread among a much, much larger group of schools − all 352 members of the NCAA's Division I.

These differences − both how football and men's basketball generate TV revenue, and how it flows to schools − make it difficult to suss out what sort of value a coach brings to a particular school.

Throw in the whims of big-money boosters, who can donate money to pay for the salary of a specific coach, and the funding picture gets even murkier.

"Different campuses do things different ways," said Robinson, the former men's basketball coach at Brown and Oregon State. "Sometimes you’ve got big-time alums who have a lot of control. Sometimes you’ve got an AD who has all the control. Sometimes you’ve got a president who has all the control. But the one thing I know is people think that they have to pay $100 million to get a good football coach. That means you should pay $100 million to get a good basketball coach, too, in my opinion."

"I’m a basketball guy, so I’m a little bit biased," he added. "But I don’t think I’m that biased."

Financial figures compiled by the Knight Commission, which has been critical of the college sports governance model and proposed a variety of potential solutions, indicate that the CFP has had a significant impact on the distribution of coaching salaries.

Perko said the data shows that the additional revenue from the CFP since 2015 has disproportionately flowed to football coaching salaries, causing them to grow twice as fast as aggregate revenues and expenses over the same time period. In the most recent fiscal year, nine Football Bowl Subdivision schools spent more money on salaries for their 11-member football coaching staff than they spent on athlete scholarships and medical expenses for all of their athletes in all sports combined, according to a Knight Commission report.

"You can look at it a lot of different ways, but the conclusion is the same," Perko said. "Presidents, athletic directors, commissioners should shift their attention from chasing more revenue and spend more time and focus on how the new and uncommitted resources should be used to better support college athletes, not grow coaching salaries."

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Why pay gap is likely to grow

For Robinson, the salary piece is just part of a broader conversation about how financial resources are spread around in college sports. He feels like the revenue from men's basketball funds the NCAA and non-revenue sports at individual schools, while the revenue from football is more frequently reinvested into football.

"The NABC is concerned that men’s basketball is just increasingly being overlooked in the whole college sports enterprise," he said.

And until and unless the coaching markets shift, that seems unlikely to change.

With his $8.5 million in school pay last year, Calipari made $2.8 million more than any other public school coach in men's college basketball, excluding outside income. Only five others received $5 million or more from their schools. In football, 10 public school coaches will make more than Calipari − including seven in the Southeastern Conference − while another 25 will eclipse the $5 million mark in school pay.

USA TODAY Sports also found that, at the Power Five public schools, the average football coach is eligible for nearly twice as much money in performance bonuses than the men's basketball coach, while being significantly more expensive to fire. The average buyout for a Power Five football coach this year is a little over $30 million. In men's basketball, it's roughly $12 million.

"There’s been a huge proliferation of football salaries, and it’s because the boosters at some of these schools have become very aggressive at poaching coaches," Smith said. "It’s forcing schools to pay up or lose their coach."

If a handful of other basketball coaches were able to negotiate deals like Calipari's, he added, maybe that sport would begin to see a similar upward trajectory in coaching salaries. But in the meantime, it's all football. And with the coming expansion of the CFP, and a new infusion of revenue, that gap is only likely to grow.

That's not to say that schools like Kentucky, North Carolina and UCLA will cease being basketball blue bloods, mind you. They'll always have that history.

But at least in terms of coaching pay, they're almost all football schools now.

Follow the reporters on social media @Tom_Schad and @ByBerkowitz.