So, How Much Is a College Coach Really Worth?

This past March, 10,000 people gathered at the University of Wisconsin's Kohl Center. "Did anybody get any sleep last night or what?" Wisconsin sportscaster Matt Lepay asked the crowd.

"Noooooo," responded the crowd dressed in the red of Bucky Badger.

"Does anybody care?"

"Noooooo!"

The night before, the Wisconsin men's basketball team had beaten Arizona 64-63 in overtime to reach the Final Four for the first time since 2000. In Madison, thousands of fans went wild on State Street well past midnight. In their red college swag, they danced, climbed bus tops and trees, and chanted "Final Four! Final Four!"

When the team returned to the Kohl Center for the welcome home rally, cameras panning the crowd showed hundreds of fans hailing Bo Ryan, the team's coach. The Final Four was the one box left un-ticked in Ryan's 30-year career in Wisconsin, one that started at UW-Platteville in 1984.

In addition to adulation, the Final Four spot helped Ryan earn a $60,000 bonus. Ryan's contract already calls for annual $100,000 raises—raises equivalent to the entire salary of the university's highest paid neuroscience professor, but just a small fraction of the more than $2 million the coach takes home every year.

And this is just basketball. And this is just Wisconsin. In 40 states, the highest paid state employee is either a college basketball or football coach; they make more than university presidents, governors, and state judges. At private schools, the salaries can be even more outlandish: Mike Krzyzewski made more than $9.6 million last year for coaching the Duke men's basketball team, according to salary data released by USA Today.

The top-25 highest-paid college football coaches at public universities receive an average salary of $3.85 million a year, which doesn't even take into account perks like use of private jets, golf club memberships, and thousands of dollars in other incentives.

When Newsday reviewed 108 college football coaches' contracts this year, they realized that their salaries had increased 75 percent compared to seven years ago, when the average head coach's salary eclipsed $1 million for the first time. At a time when tuition rates for higher education are seeing a dramatic rise and education debt is piling up all over the country, it is baffling that coaches get paid millions for doing something that directly influences only a small group of student-athletes.

University presidents and chancellors counter that successful athletic programs are a gateway to attracting students, are generally self-sufficient, and contribute to academic scholarships. The biggest argument favoring soaring coaching salaries is that the competitive market drives them up.

"The reality is [team success is] not exact science. It's pretty hard to duplicate," Pat Richter, who was the Athletic Director at Wisconsin for 15 years before Barry Alvarez, said. "They can't say just say that we're gonna hire someone for $500,000 and have him coach the team. That's putting the whole program at risk."

For managing a successful basketball program, Bo Ryan gets $2.9 million. For running the entire state, albeit less successfully, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker gets $144,423. Ryan's annual compensation for 2013 was also five times more than Wisconsin University Chancellor David Ward's salary, who took home $437,000. The University president's regular pay is $417,000.

Nick Saban, who's coached Alabama to three national championships in the last five years, gets $6.9 million a year, with added incentives that rival pro coaches' compensations. But sometimes the winning percentages of teams have little to do with what college coaches make. For example, in his post on most overpaid basketball coaches last year, Forbes' Tom Van Riper noted that Missouri basketball's Fank Haith never finished better than sixth in the ACC. Riper's annual compensation was still over a $1 million.

Is it morally justifiable that coaches get millions while academics scramble for research grants and teaching assistants are routinely exploited?

"It certainly doesn't look good from the outside (that coaches make more than the governor and university president)," says Jane Piliavin, who has spent 44 years at UW-Madison and the last 15 teaching a sociology of sports course. But Piliavin added that the university gets an educational return on the coaching investment.

She makes the argument that since the middle of the 20th century, compensation for people who work in major men's sports has always been disproportionate. She says coaches' salaries can't be compared to those of academics and there will always be a hierarchy, even between departments—faculty at professional schools will be paid more than faculty in the arts and sciences, for example.

"Even assistant coaches make more than assistant and associate professors," she said. "You can grumble about it, you can say it isn't fair, it isn't right in terms of how valuable the activities that faculty participate in are, but it's two completely different spheres."

But the increasingly divergent salary gaps do hurt others at universities. According to data that contrasts pay growth for head coaches vs academics in a report by the American Association of University Professors, football and basketball coaches saw a salary increase of 79 percent during 2005-11 while professors' salaries increased by just four percent. And data analysis by Wisconsin's Teacher's Assistant Association (TAA) shows that the net graduate student compensation at the University, $8,700, is second to last among schools in the Big Ten Colleges.

"It's absolutely a moral issue," says Charity Schmidt, co-president of the TAA and a graduate student lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Wisconsin. "The way we compensate people represents our priorities and represents the importance we place on people's contributions to our state. What we're saying is that the basketball coach means more to our University or state than even the chancellor or the heads of government."

"People who actually work to provide education on our campus are being derided. The dignity and stability of being an academic worker is being eroded," Schmidt said referring to the pay gap.

So, what's the right amount of compensation for coaches? When you take the TV deals and the publicity into account, are all those millions worth it? Well, you can certainly bet that some of those Wisconsin fans hailing Bo Ryan feel he's worth every dollar, even if it comes at the cost of their own education.