The Indicator from Planet Money - Why are college coaches paid so much?

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

If you had to guess, would you say the president of a university usually makes more money than the football coach? Well, you may be wrong. A college's football coach is often their highest paid employee. The University of Alabama pays its football coach on average close to $11 million. Today on the show, why are college football coaches paid so much? Do their salaries really make economic sense? Related episodes:Why the Olympics cost so much (Apple / Spotify)Want to get ahead in youth sports? Try staying back a year (Apple / Spotify)For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. Student loans are getting serious now. If you don't pay, the government will soon start to do things like bring in debt collectors and garnish wages. So it's worth looking at exactly what tuition and fees are paying for. You've got building maintenance, administration, professors' salaries. Yeah, and what about the highest paid college employee? That's often the football coach. Yeah, take the University of Alabama.

its football coach is getting paid close to $11 million. University of Georgia, its football coach was paid over $13 million last year. Meanwhile, the college's president was getting paid about $1 million. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darien Woods. And I'm Adrian Ma. Today on the show, why are college football coaches paid so much? Does it really make economic sense?

We crunch the numbers after the break. To learn about what? why a football coach might be valuable for a university, we spoke to Greg Byrne. Greg Byrne is the University of Alabama's athletic director. So he's the one that hires the coaches. You know, we actually spoke to mid-game. About our baseball game, we have the SEC tournament. We're up two to one on Missouri in the bottom of the sixth. I love that he's so dedicated to his job, he wouldn't even tear himself away from a game to, like, do an interview with you. Yeah, you know, sometimes his eyes were drifting, but, you know, he's multitasking.

Last year, Greg hired football coach Kalin DeBoer for that annual salary of almost $11 million. That puts him in the top 10 highest paid coaches in the country. And so we asked Greg, what's up with that? And he said, look, the football team turns a very healthy profit. So does basketball. But then they have a lot of other sports that don't make money. And so it's an economic model where football is the engine that pulls the train. It generates the revenues for us to be able to have broad-based programming across.

the board to not only offer great opportunities for your student athletes, but it's a way to get people involved and engage with your university like few other things can. Along with turning a profit, Greg says the football team helps attract students. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, long ways away from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I may have been the only student at my high school of 1,200 kids that knew where Tuscaloose, Alabama was because that was such a college sports nut. And Greg points to Alabama's previous coach, Nick Sabin. After a dry decade and a half, Sabin brought the team to a national championship victory

in 2009. And when Saban arrived, the student body was around 25,000. And we've gone to over, you know, 40,000 now. So it's almost like they're a coach, but they're also a form of advertisement. They are. I mean, when you're the head football coach of the University of Alabama, the recognition goes throughout the country. Greg is arguing that a top coach means a better football team, which means more ticket sales

and also more buzz that can boost enrollment. Okay, so case closed. It makes economic sense for colleges to pay top dollar for football and basketball coaches. Not so fast, Adrian. Andrew Zimbalist is a sports economist at Smith College. Unquestionably, there are individual cases of it, Alabama or a few other cases. But the general phenomenon is, no, they don't benefit. from these large salaries.

Andrew has run the numbers. He's looked at what happens when a new coach is brought in with a high salary. You know, if you're paying some coach $7 million and there's not a $7 million spike in revenue,

then it's not paying off for you. In fact, Andrew Faiser at the top leagues, athletic departments are each losing an average of $20 million or more a year. So the pricey coaches

might not be paying off in terms of ticket sales. But what about increasing the school's brand? Basically, that evidence is not robust. Some people who look at it sometimes find a small benefit. Sometimes they find no benefit at all. Sometimes they find a negative relationship. That's not to say that it couldn't happen at a particular school. It can happen at a particular school, but does it happen as a regular process? It doesn't seem to. And therefore, the notion that you should make these investments in the form of losses, $10 and $20 million losses every year on your team, doesn't hold up as a positive economic strategy. So in general, if building up a top athletic department in a college does not make economic sense,

why is it so widespread? I mean, in at least 39 states, the person with the highest salary on public payrolls is either a football coach or a basketball coach. The explanation is that it's an artificial market. It's not a normal business commercial market. Andrew says we shouldn't think of the market for football coaches as free markets, like the market for, I don't know, sandwiches or living room furniture. And he has five reasons.

First, college sports has a bunch of tax benefits. Secondly, these programs are publicly owned, meaning they don't have private shareholders demanding they turn a profit each year. Third, there are often large subsidies from the university and state governments. Fourth, the students often subsidized sports through their college tuition. And finally, until recently, college athletes didn't get paid, and so there was more funding available for the coaches' salaries. So you don't have any of the normal discipline that happens in a typical commercial market

when you move over to college sports. And for that reason, even though college coaches are being paid, it can be argued a market salary. It's a very artificial and jiggered market. Meanwhile, the college president has a lot on their plate. Raising money from donors, keeping the alumni happy, keeping the faculty happy, keeping the student body happy, dealing with a local town, dealing with buildings and grounds and deferred maintenance.

And then there's this other thing called athletics. And athletics is part of the culture. It's something that all the alumni love and like. And rather than trying to reform college athletics and create a different set of incentives and pressures, College presidents decide simply to leave it alone. The few college presidents historically who have stood up and said, this is unacceptable, this is shameful what we're doing, they've gotten their wings clipped.

This battle between presidents and athletic departments goes way back in American history. In the early 1900s, there was a president at UNC Chapel Hill, who was, according to the New York Times, practically run out of town after criticizing the athletic department. Fast forward to today, a 2009 survey, of university presidents with major football programs found that 85% felt that football and basketball coaches' salaries were excessive, but they felt they couldn't control them.

And so let's go back to the University of Alabama, which pays nearly $11 million a year for one football coach. We did some math, and that's about $266 per college student at Alabama. And so we asked athletic director Greg Byrne whether that money was well spent. Do you think the students, you know, might be wondering, hmm, what if I had a $266 discount on my tuition fees? Well, those are two different buckets that the revenue comes from to pay for those things.

The revenue to pay for our coaches' salaries come from revenue that we generate through ticket sales, through donations, through our conference revenue and television packages. So it's, I can understand the question, but it's just completely two different sets of buckets, of revenue that those are being paid by. In other words, Greg says students do not subsidize Alabama's football coach because the football program pays for itself. And maybe Alabama is a special case where it does pay off. But not every college can be a superstar school.

You know, each institution has to decide what works for them. If you look at smaller colleges, let's say, they've decided many of them that athletics is worth investing in and that it creates engagement for the university in many different facets, and they've decided that's a way to invest and market their program. But that's up to that individual institution. Any other final thoughts you want to leave us with? Well, I hope we win the baseball game today.

What's the score now after the end of the interview? Still two to one. Okay, holding the line. That's right. We're in the top of the seventh now. And in case you're wondering, Alabama did end up winning the game. The baseball coach earns about $900,000 a year. Peanuts. What a steal.

This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim and Corey Bridges. It was engineered by Sena Lafredo. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, kick-and-canon edits the show, and the indicators of production of NPR.