NIL era coaches contract

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Not sniffing a top coach

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Like who? Most of the top coaches aren’t going anywhere. You’re right, some of yall are retards

Who do you want as coach?

How much are you willing to pay them?

How long of a contract will you offer them?

Are you willing to offer guarantees?

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So at some point you have to assess the ROI on coaches salaries. In the world of NIL, we could be getting to a tipping point where paying a tier 2 coach and investing the rest of the money in the roster will get you a better return than a $15M coach. This is basically the NFL model and college football is heading in that direction.

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It’s complicated by the rules around NIL and revenue sharing though.

The revenue sharing portion from the school is capped at $20.5 million for the whole athletic department. The cap will increase by 4% each year for the next two years then will be re-evaluated based on 22% of average power conference athletic revenue. So theoretically the dev share cap should hover around that 22% average.

That means that 78% of your athletic department revenue (assuming your school has average P4 revenue) can’t be used to pay players. For schools like LSU with higher-than-average revenue, the percentage is higher.

On the NIL side it’s obviously a different beast.. boosters can spend their money where they want for the most part. So as long as your coach’s salary is coming from the athletic department’s normal recurring revenue, there’s a limit to how much you can divert to players. As soon as you reach a point where private donors are paying for the coach’s salary (e.g. a buyout scenario) you’re theoretically spending dollars you could have spent on NIL instead.

The big difference in the NFL is that the salary cap is based on 48% of total league revenue, rather than 22%. Also the fact that team owners expect a profit (making that 48% an even higher percentage of total costs) while college athletic departments are non-profit. Of course the flip side is that NFL teams aren’t funding non-revenue sports.

The end result is that the economy of college sports is.. messy. And it’s not quite as straightforward as simply diverting coaching salaries to players.

There's a market for the top head coaches. Most have several schools they can pick from. You either pay according to the market, or you settle for less. If you settle for less, you may get lucky; but don't expect to play hardball with a top-level head coach and his agent.