Statistical Analysis of Football Coaches Salaries

by sarasota-card on Nov 10, 2009 4:56 PM EST

In an ongoing effort to bring more math to this site, I decided to delve into the coaches salary information that was published in a USA Today article about 2009 NCAA college football contracts (hat tip to Brian Bennett who found it first for his blog). Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of missing information (there's no data for 9 schools), and a lot of it in the Big East. But poor data has never stopped a thorough analysis before, so lets go!

Kragthorpe's total salary is $1,216,000.

Kragthorpe ranks 47th out of 112 reporting schools
Highest reported: Pete Carroll - USC - $4,386,652)
Lowest reported: Charlie Weatherbie - Louisiana Monroe - $160,000

Kragthorpe makes 2.2% more than the average salary of $1,189,223.

Kragthorpe ranks 5th out of Big East Schools (but Pitt did not report Wannstedt's outside income, and Syracuse is being a dick about the whole thing).
Highest reported: Greg Schiano - Rutgets - $2,070,932)
Lowest reported: Bill Stewart - West Virginia - $878,000)

Kragthorpe makes 11.0% less than the average Big East salary of $1,365,246.

The Big East has the 6th highest average salary out of 12 conferences.

SEC - $2,637,599
Big 12 - $1,982,504
ACC - $1,844,198
Pac-10 - $1,791,248
Big Ten - $1,764,678
Big East - $1,365,246
MWC - $894,535
CUSA - $807,939
WAC - $605,675
Independent * - $503,105
MAC - $341,678
Sun Belt - $281,647

* I know Independent isn't really a conference, and I don't care.

I would love to build a database that corrilates this with the coaches winning percentage. Then use that to calculate a "Return of Investment" factor to see where we rank there, but I have a real job and they might fire me if I don't get back to doing it. One last thing, though...

If we hired Jon Gruden for the rumored $3.5 mil, he would rank tops in the Big East, 7th overall, and higher than nine of the SEC schools. I'm just saying.

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Comments

How about this?

I’m gonna go with the old XFL formula: you only get paid if you win. Therefore, I’ve taken total salary and divided it by 12 to get the salary per game. Then I went ahead and mutiplied that by the number of games each coach has won this season to see how much they’ve currently made and how much the could have potentially earned so far:

Randy Edsall – $120,833.33 x 4 = $483,333 out of $1,087,500
Brian Kelly – $110,541.67 x 9 = $994,875 out of $994,875
Steve Kragthorpe – $101,333.33 x 3 = $304,000 out of $912,000
Jim Leavitt – $133,333.33 x 6 = $800,000 out of $1,066,666.66
Doug Marrone^ – $91,666.66 x 3 = $275,000 out of $825,000
Greg Shiano – $172,577.66 x 6 = $1,035,466 out of $1,380,621.33
Bill Stewart – $73,166.66 x 7 = $512,166.66 out of $685,500
Dave Wannstedt^ – $108,333.33 x 8 = $86,666.66 out of $975,000

Now, Return of Investment in this case is just the winning percentage, but here it is anyways:

Randy Edsall – 44.4%
Brian Kelly – 100%
Steve Kragthorpe – 33.3%
Jim Leavitt – 75%
Doug Marrone – 33.3%
Greg Shiano – 75%
Bill Stewart – 77.7%
Dave Wannstedt – 88.8%

I’m rather annoyed by the fact that Kragthorpe gets a little over 100K per LOSS.

^ – I used the reported coaches salary found here: http://www.wolfereports.com/2009/08/06/coaches-salaries-released-meyer-at-top-among-public-unis/

by CardinalDude on Nov 10, 2009 8:24 PM EST reply actions