Are College Football Coaches Overpaid? A New Study Says No

The amount of money that athletes and coaches make in professional sports is outrageous. However, they only make that much because people are willing to pay that much. What about in college sports? We hear of coaches like Les Miles, Nick Saban, and even our own Mark Hudspeth making far more in salary than your average English professor. Is this right that that these and other coaches earn so much more than other faculty and staff do? Your darn right it is and the facts will back it up.

In college athletics it is all about money. Where there is money you have to look for value and according to a new study from Vanderbilt University, most highly paid college coaches deliver a great value based on the return in revenue they bring to their schools.

The study compared the salaries of college coaches and the value of their respective programs to CEO's of other businesses that had a similar value. The results were surprisingly close.

"The comparison to CEOs is interesting, because while we think of a CEO as creating enormous value, the actual contribution of the CEO to the value of the firm is much murkier,"

Randall Thomas made those remarks to the Louisiana Radio Network. Thomas is one of the co-authors of the study from Vanderbilt.

Basically what this study is suggesting is that the money that colleges coaches earn via their contracts with their respective universities is for the most part right in line with the same ratio of earnings to salary for big companies around the country.

Alex Van Horn, another co-author of the study, told Louisiana Radio Network,

"Whether you're talking about Nick Saban, or the CEO of a Fortune 100 company,What you really have to dive into is what is the value this person is creating for the organization, and is their contract structured such that they win when their organization wins."

In many cases coaching contracts are tied directly to results so again the model for business and coaching seems to tick and tie like a well balanced spread sheet.

Here is a video of the Mr. Thomas and Mr. Van Horn discussing their study.