NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. – The players at Texas and Alabama will compete Thursday night for the chance to be called national champions and for a beautiful crystal trophy to be placed outside their locker room.
Their coaches have even more at stake.
Mack Brown of Texas stands to make $450,000 if he leads the Longhorns past Alabama in the BCS championship game. If the Crimson Tide wins, Nick Saban would get $200,000 on top of the $200,000 he’s already earned by making it to the national title game.
All that is in addition to what Brown and Saban, two of the highest-paid coaches in the business, already receive. Brown recently had his salary permanently increased to $5.1 million a year. Saban signed an extension that makes his deal worth $4.7 million annually.
That’s nearly $10 million a year for two men to coach football. And even though they work on campuses where the sport is king, the staggering salaries put a laser point on a broader debate in academia: When the average college professor makes around $115,000 and not a single college player earns a paycheck, is a college football coach worth that kind of money?
“From a business standpoint, if you asked CEOs in the state of Texas, they’d agree with it,” Brown said Tuesday. “And if you ask other people, they might not, because when the football coach makes more than the university president, it’s hard to understand, and I get that.”
But UT’s president is one of the most unapologetic backers of Brown and the money he makes.
