$1M club grows in college football
12 assistants reach milestone, nearly 200 hit $400K threshold
Compensation for college football assistant coaches continues marching upward.
Twelve assistants who began this season on staffs of top-level Bowl Subdivision teams were making at least $1 million, according to an annual survey of assistant coaches salaries by USA TODAY Sports.
In 2009, when USA TODAY Sports first tracked assistants’ pay, only one made $1 million or more.
Also that year, 13 assistants made at least $400,000. This season, 191 are making at least $400,000.
The upward trend is not slowing. LSU announced Wednesday that, pending approval from its governing board, it would give defensive coordinator Dave Aranda a new, three-year contract that will start at $1.8 million and increase by $50,000 each year. Aranda is making just over $1.3 million this season, and his recent salary arc provides an example, albeit an extreme one, of the national trend. In 2012, as Utah State’s defensive coordinator, Aranda’s pay from the school was $155,000. In 2015, his basic pay in the same job at Wisconsin was $520,000.
Alabama and Clemson — two of the semifinalists in the College Football Playoff — pay their nineman staffs more than $5.3 million. Fourteen schools pay their assistants more than $4 million; there were nine last season, five in 2014 and one in 2011.