re: USA Today Releases List of Highest Paid College Football Coaches for 2017 season

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Had no idea Rich Rod made that much. Wow

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Arizona football coach Rich Rodriguez’s compensation for this season puts him at a pay level otherwise occupied by people who have won at least one national championship or led a team to the Super Bowl.

But Nick Saban, Jim Harbaugh, Dabo Swinney, Urban Meyer, Jimbo Fisher, their agents — and athletics directors across the country — can exhale.

Rodriguez won’t be in their neighborhood for long.

More than half of the $6 million he is scheduled to make during his current contract year comes from one-time pay components added to his deal in 2014, then revised a year later.

Salaries database: See how much every coach makes

In addition, if Arizona’s season were to crater and the school decided to fire him before March 15, 2018, he would get none of this one-time money that is taking him from somewhere near the 40th-highest paid coach in major-college football to a place among the top five.


If Rodriguez leaves Arizona or gets fired for cause before March 15, he would forfeit all of the one-time pay.

Rodriguez is not the only one at the top of USA TODAY Sports’ survey of head coaches’ pay whose compensation for his current contract year includes an unusual amount. Saban’s $11.1 million includes a $4 million contract signing bonus, and Swinney’s $8.5 million includes $2.5 million in forms of one-time pay.

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In 2014, Rodriguez was coming off his third season at Arizona. The Wildcats had just gone 10-4, won the Pac-12 Conference South Division and played in the Fiesta Bowl. In addition, a university benefactor had made an enormous donation to the University of Arizona Foundation for purposes that specifically included providing financial incentives for Rodriguez, men’s basketball coach Sean Miller and athletics director Greg Byrne in hopes or retaining them for the long term.

In Rodriguez’s case, the aim was keeping him through the end of a new five-year contract that initially was set to run through May 31, 2019, but then extended a year later to go through May 31, 2020.

The retention provision set up a series of payment and vesting dates at which Rodriguez would become entitled to portions of the donation, which was made in units of a publicly traded master limited partnership rather than in cash. The university has declined to provide information identifying the partnership, but the Financial Times has identified it as Western Refining Logistics LP.

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