Wisconsin passes on paying inflated salary to football coach
Alvarez and Co. keep finding ways to stay competitive
Wisconsin athletics director Barry Alvarez played football for Nebraska 50 years ago, when Tom Osborne was an assistant coach there. Saturday, Al- varez’s Badgers will play Nebraska on Tom Osborne Field. As it happens, the ex-Wisconsin coach likes to tell a story about a conversation with the ex-Nebraska coach from a time when Osborne was the Cornhuskers AD.
“He called and asked if I would share with him what I was paying my coaches, football and basketball,” Alvarez says. “So I said, ‘Sure,’ and I told him. There was this long hesitation, and then Tom said, ‘You and I got out a little too early.’ ”
Alvarez lets loose a long laugh. His last full season coaching Wisconsin football was 2005. USA TODAY Sports began tracking top-tier coaches’ salaries in 2006. The average compensation for head football coaches at 119 major colleges then was roughly $950,000. Today, at 128 Football Bowl Subdivision schools, it is up to just over $2 million.
That means the average compensation package is upmore than 110% — and, even
adjusting for inflation, has nearly doubled in a decade. The trend to ever-richer contracts boils down to this: Schools frequently pay more, and sometimes much more, to retain a coach or to hire one. And that’s where Alvarez is getting the last laugh.
Wisconsin is the anti-trend of compensation inflation. Paul Chryst is making $2.3 million to coach the Badgers this season. That’s the amount Gary Andersen was set tomake atWisconsin, before he left for Oregon State, where he is making $2.45 million. Alvarez did not make a big-money bid to keep Andersen.
Bret Bielema was making $2.64 million at Wisconsin when he left for Arkansas for a $3.2 million deal. Alvarez hired Andersen from Utah State for far less — $1.8 million. Chryst’s compensation package is No. 41 among the 52 public schools in the Power Five conferences— and Wisconsin is a rare example of a Power Five school where the football coach is making less today than in 2012.
“I think all our coaches are paid fairly,” Alvarez says. “We don’t normally look nationally to see where our coaches are ranked. We’ll look in our league.”
Chryst’s compensation ranks No. 9 among the 14 Big Ten schools, where the median salary is $2.5 million.
Wisconsin chancellor Rebecca Blank criticizes her Big Ten peers who are paying coaches so much.
“Those are the choices they make,” she says. “That really begins to threaten the whole sense that we are not professional athletic teams. I’m not terribly happy about the fact that they made those choices. That’smy opinion.”
Alvarez doesn’t share it. “I look at it as their business. I do. I don’t concern myself. I don’t feel like we’re in competition with salaries at Ohio State or Michigan. … When you’re Ohio State and football is as important as it is in that state and you have an opportunity to hire someone who has a couple of national championships in his hip pocket and is from that state, it makes sense to pay him. He’s that valuable. … And Harbaugh, I think it’s a coup for Michigan and our league. I think he is worthy of that salary. That’s what they can command. The market drives that.”
Blank understandsmarket forces. She was acting secretary of commerce in the Obama administration and holds a doctorate in economics fromMassachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Well, clearly the market for football and basketball coaches is a whole lot tighter than the market for chancellors and presidents,” she says, chuckling. Her salary is $499,950.
‘PRETTY FORTUNATE’
Chryst’s Badgers are 3-2 and fell out of the top 25 rankings after Saturday’s home loss to Iowa. But fans here will give him time. He’s one of them.
Chryst was born in Madison, 50 years ago next month. His father, George, was an assistant football coach at Wisconsin and a high school football and basketball coach in Madison who’d one day move his family 75 miles west to coach football at Wisconsin-Platteville. As athletics director there, George Chryst hired Bo Ryan, who’d win four Division III national championships in men’s basketball — and who’d go on to be the longtime Wisconsin coach who took the Badgers to the last two Final Fours.
That means Chryst’s father — who died in 1993, at 55 — sired and hired the current coaches of Wisconsin’s top sports. What would he make of that?
“He’d have to do a double take to see Bo coaching basketball and me coaching football” at Wisconsin, Chryst says. “But he’d be proud.”
Chryst played football at Wisconsin, as his father had. And he followed his father into the family business, coaching as an assistant at 10 stops (including col- lege, the Canadian Football League and the NFL) before arriving at Wisconsin for his second tour of duty in 2005. He was the Badgers’ offensive coordinator before getting the head coaching gig at Pittsburgh in 2012. Three seasons later he’s happy to be back, with a clear understanding that to remain a favorite son his Badgers will have to win.
And for the record, even ifWisconsin represents the anti-trend, Chryst does not view himself as underpaid.
CALL FOR A SALARY CAP
Blank has given the issue of salaries a good deal of thought — and she offers a radical suggestion.
“Coaches are being paid, especially in a couple of big sports, increasingly like professional leagues,” she says. “It immediately raises the question of, ‘ Why aren’t your athletes being paid similarly?’ If I could redo this, I would try to get some sort of antitrust exemption here and say, ‘ We run a college sports program — and college sports programs are different. And we do have the right to cap salaries, given the salary levels that exist elsewhere around the university.’
“And the expectation is that these students are students, as well as athletes, meaning it is not a for-profit program. People who want tomake those kinds of salaries need to be in professional sports. I’ma losing voice on that now.”
Blank says she is pleased to be at a school where she and other officials consider the athletics department to be selffunding. Wisconsin’s athletics department is not one of the two dozen that are self-sufficient by the NCAA’s reckoning of generated revenue vs. total expenditure. But Meredith McGlone, UW’s director of news and media relations, says it doesn’t use the NCAA’s formula because it doesn’t account for all the funding the athletics department gives back. She says the department didn’t offer methodology or funding numbers, just that it gives back more money than it receives.
Athletics departments typically get money from student fees, university funds and/or government support, but they also send money to their schools through payments for scholarships and facilities and through other transfers. When those amounts are balanced, according to a USA TODAY Sports analysis, all 50 of the public schools that were in Power Five conferences in 2013-14 were self-sufficient.
Wisconsin reported to the NCAA that it provided $8.1 million in university support to the athletics department in 2013-14 and that the department spent $52.2 million on scholarships, facilities and other transfers.
Wisconsin’s athletics department says it made a roughly $5 million transfer to the university in 2014-15. Blank says she has asked athletics to raise the amount it gives back by $2 million in the coming year, when the school plans to cut $86 million from its overall budget because of state cuts to education that total $250 million statewide this year.
“We are a total university, and I wasn’t going to cut educational programs deeply and leave no cuts elsewhere,” Blank says.
Blank says when she puts on her economist’s hat she sees clear differences between college and pro sports. She says Wisconsin athletics makes money on football and men’s basketball and often men’s hockey — and loses money on20other sports.
“Now, if I were running a business, I’d abolish those and run three,” she says. “But I’m not running a business. I’m running a college sports enterprise, among other things. And I think there is an enormous value to athletics and sports for young individuals, both men and women.”