Good morning and thank you for taking time out of your day to read NILnomics. I think you’ll enjoy today’s newsletter.
You don’t need me to tell you about what happened with Lane Kiffin. If you’re connected to college sports at any level, you know that he just left the 11-1, playoff bound Ole Miss team to become the new coach of LSU. I’ve written about coaches before (here and here) but clearly there’s more interest in the topic. Therefore this week I’ll be looking at:
$ and Losses - how much does a coach’s salary and # losses impact when they get fired?
Athlete vs. Coach budget % - looking to see how much schools distributed to the two main cogs of the machine
Pour a drink. Get comfortable. Let’s get into it.
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Money vs. Losses, Visualized
As the coaching carousel has spun this season—and we all gape at the buyouts these coaches are walking away with ($50+ million for James Franklin!)—what grabbed my attention wasn’t the size of the checks. It was when these coaches were fired. Sure, plenty of dismissals have come in the past week now that the regular season wrapped up. But a surprising number happened just a few games into the year.
That pattern made me wonder: what exactly is going on inside an Athletic Director’s head? On one hand, highly paid coaches are expected to deliver, and when they don’t, ADs are under pressure to act. The fan appetite must be fed. On the other hand, if a school isn’t at the top of the salary/prestige hierarchy, maybe the AD has more tolerance for losing—less money at stake, less national scrutiny.
My hypothesis going into this analysis was simple: higher-paid coaches get fired earlier and with fewer losses, while lower-paid coaches—whose bosses have more financial breathing room—are allowed more time (and more losses). To test this, I plotted coach salary against number of losses.
A few quick notes about the chart: teams that kept their coach are greyed out, while teams that fired their coach are highlighted. I also show two loss totals for fired coaches—how many losses they had at the moment of termination and how many they finished with. Together, this gives a clearer picture of how teams performed under interim leadership and what tradeoffs ADs were weighing between current losses and projected losses.
Here’s the chart:
Quick Takeaways:
3 losses seems like a magic number. 5 head coaches fired at 3 losses is more than any other point in the list.
It’s interesting to see the coaches/teams who kept their coach despite large salary/# losses. Clemson, UNC, Colorado, and Kentucky (sorry Stoops was fired after I made this graph!) all seem like they should have followed the upper-level trend of Penn State, LSU, and Florida and moving on.
My hypothesis would have predicted UAB to have held on a bit longer. But then again, it’s Trent Dilfer we’re talking about.
Oklahoma State pulled the trigger the earliest and also saw the biggest increase in # of losses over the course of the season.
Analyst’s Desk
Data comes from USA Today’s coaching salary database.
Coaching Salaries vs Athlete Scholarships
Everyone knows that before NIL—and especially before the House settlement—athletic departments had two choices for any unspent revenue: upgrade facilities or pay coaches more. Notice how I didn’t say “give money back to the larger institution”? Ha.
Thinking about massive buyouts and ballooning salaries made me wonder: how much of a football program’s budget actually goes to its coaches? And while I was digging into that, a related question popped up: how much goes to the athletes themselves?
Then I had an even better idea—compare the two. Surely, like every professional sport in the world, there’s no way coaches are getting paid more than the athletes… right? Well…
Before diving into the chart, a few caveats.
This data is specific to football programs, not entire athletic departments. It comes from the annual financial reports I’ve scraped (which I’ve written about before), and that’s why many FBS schools are missing. The data is also from FY2024, well before House payments began. To be charitable, athlete compensation here is capped by design—programs can only award 85 full scholarships, and at the time, there was nothing else they could legally pay athletes.
Still, it’s striking to see just how much more of these football budgets went to coaches compared to players.
Let’s take a closer look:
Quick Takeaways:
Clearly a larger proportion of the athletic department’s football budget is going to coaches compared to the players for all but a few schools. There are some outliers (Eastern Michigan, Kennesaw State, Ohio and Marshall) but the overall trend is to pay the coaches more than award scholarship funds to players.
I had to check San Jose State myself manually and it’s true - over 50% of their football budget went to the coach.
Player distribution is likely more a function of the cost of attendance (tuition and fees) than any intentional policy.
Texas A&M and Nebraska seem like outliers at the lower end of the coach allocation
Shout out to my alma mater Bowling Green for putting up more towards players (28%) compared to coaches (22%)
It makes you wonder about the post-House world. Are schools going to continue to pay exorbitant coach salaries when they can now reallocate funds to players directly? I think this is the under appreciated strategy that will drive college football over the coming years.
Analyst’s Desk
Data for this analysis comes from the annual MFRS reports. I limited it to FBS schools and the latest fiscal year (2024) for this analysis. Coaches’ salaries include all coaches for the team, not just HCs. Student athlete scholarships are capped at COA and could be as low as covering tuition/fees.
🔉 What I’m Listening To 🔉
I’m always on the lookout for anyone breaking down college sports and especially the business side of the industry. Here’s this week’s best listens:
Higher Ed Athletics - Travis interviews South Dakota’s AD Justin Sell. He gives great insight into what it’s like coaching in rural fly-over country, how to run a coach search, and his experience coaching up leaders underneath him.
NIL Clubhouse - the guys review the latest news and updates on NIL. Their chat on passive income through different merchandise companies that schools can take of advantage of was fun.
SportsWise - Gabe gets to chat with Senator Richard Blumenthal on everything NIL in Congress. Alot of new information here that’s worth hearing.
Trustees & Presidents - Sacramento State’s Dr. Luke Wood has a lot of opinions. This is the most I’ve heard him speak. He certainly has strong opinions, I’ll say that.
Trustees and Presidents - an interesting interview with Dr. Polly Peterson, president of the University of Jonestown who discusses transitioning from NAIA to NCAA DII. She gives a behinds the scenes look at what was happening.
Final Thoughts
Thanks for reading this week’s issue.
I really enjoyed diving a bit deeper into one topic this week. Especially something that’s a bit more timely than most week’s analysis. If you enjoyed this week’s issue, let me know by email. Thanks again for your time. Now finish your beverage 😀
Until next time,
Greg Chick, PhD
Data Analyst
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NILnomics is an independent data-driven newsletter uncovering the real numbers behind college sports finances with sharp insights, clear visuals, and exclusive datasets. Please send any thoughts, questions, or feedback to me at [email protected] and please follow me on X @NILnomics. Don’t forget all our data is available on Kaggle, code on GitHub, and FOIA documents on GoogleDrive. See you next week!