1. CPJ is, IMO, one of the elite coaches in the country. Definitely top 20. I'd put him in the top 10. And I honestly don't think a Saban, Meyer, Spurrier, etc could have done much better than CPJ has thus far. So I'd say his pay should correspond to that.
2. Ted's pay should be whatever CPJ thinks he deserves. No one else in the program has a better understanding of Roofs value to the program. I think this is true for the entire staff. And it should be something CPJ and Mbob work closely together on. I doubt this to be the case however.
3. You really want to tie home attendance to coaching salary??? Say hello to unending mediocrity. Actually this would make mediocre tough to achieve. There are other streams of revenue to utilize. That's a simple and clear fact.
4 & 5. I don't expect Mbob to fart out money to pay coaches. Mbob is being very well compensated himself, to manage 4 and 5 though.
6. I've already given him a kudo for this. But it honestly was a no brainer. We were probably at about the level of Rice. Which was inexcusable. So yay for Mbob. He now has us, maybe, in the middle of the pack here.
Even if the coaches are being paid the absolute most Tech can afford financially, which isn't true, it still doesn't excuse the shoddy way Mbob handled the whole "hot seat" issue.
I was responding to the point about us underpaying our assistant coaches.
1. This is precisely my point. Paul Johnson last year was fourth behind only Fisher, Dabo, and Petrino in terms of school salary ($2.588 mil I believe, although if you count "other pay" he falls slightly behind Beamer). This year I believe he will make around $3.02 mil (average yearly salary under his new contract), which would put him in the top 25 nationally and top 3 in the conference, jumping Petrino. We chose to pay Paul well, because he is the most important cog, which probably prevents us from paying the assistants more than we otherwise would with a cheaper HC.
2. Roof made $623 last year, good for 30th in the country (which is really more like 15th seeing as there are coordinators on both sides of the ball, e.g. LSU, Clemson, and Bama each had both assistants ranked higher in terms of pay last year). Roof, for example, made more than Mike Bobo last year. Again, the point being we choose to pay our coordinator relatively more than we pay the other assistant coaches.
3. Of course ticket sales factor into how much money we have to pay out coaches. We could hire a Saban type coach otherwise - just throw $15 million at someone. I'm not tying them directly together, but we can't just cut a blank check to all of our coaches when we can't afford that. It would be foolish.
Let's consider it this way. Assume the average ticket price for a football game is $40. Last year our home attendance was a total of 291,113 people. Let's take a look at how much the top programs are raking in - Ohio State was tops with 744,075 people. That's about $29.76 million in ticket revenue, compared to (my estimation of) ours at about $11,644,520. Georgia would have been about $25.97 million. In our conference, both Clemson and FSU made around $23 million.
How can we possibly keep up with other schools when they are making more than double what we are on ticket sales? Especially since, as noted above, we do try to keep up with them in head coaching and coordinator salaries. In terms of attendance, we are closer to Maryland, Utah, Rutgers, Minnesota, and East Carolina than we are to major programs.
We have 8 assistant coaches. Say Ohio State has the same number of coaches and sets aside an additional $1 million (of the $18 million more than us it makes in ticket sales). They would, on average, have $125k more to pay each assistant. And I'm sure they set aside more than that to pay their assistants, since that is still a small fraction of their ticket revenue.
Simply put - we can't pay our coaches with money we don't have. Since other schools have that money, they don't have the same problem as us.
4. We are 47th in athletic department revenue at $68 million. Right in front of Iowa State. That's LAST in reporting schools (Duke, for example, doesn't have to publish its revenues since it is a private school). Again, let's compare. Oregon had a revenue of $196 million. Texas, $161. In conference, FSU had $104.8 million in revenue. North Carolina had $83.8. Again, its pretty tough to be competitive in coaching salary when the other schools have more money than us. We can say things like "well coaching is an investment, so we should pay them a lot," but the truth is that other schools don't feel differently than us, and can (and do) pay more than we can afford.
5. Without subsidies from the school, the athletic department LOST $9 million last year. That puts us 105th in profits, behind Morehead State and Cal State-Fullerton, just ahead of North Carolina A&T and Louisiana Tech.
On the other hand, Ohio State MADE $23.6 million. Bama? $21.4 million. Without subsidies, schools like FSU, Clemson, and UGA are much closer to breaking even than we are (and, of course, that is counting the greater expense presented by their assistant coaches). Again, we can't pay our coaches more with money we don't have.
