I was in Tallahassee this weekend visiting my parents and read in Sunday morning’s paper that the Florida State assistant coaches just received an average raise of over $60,000 apiece. More power to them!
When I first got into coaching in 1978, I didn’t get into the profession to make a lot of money. I chose coaching because I loved it. I was an assistant for 19 years before I became a Head Coach. Assistant coaches work just as long and hard as a Head Coach, it’s just a different kind of work.
While the Head Coach now has become more of a CEO type, dealing with assistants, players, alumni, administration, and all the support staff. The assistant coaches are the nuts and bolts of the program. The big money that only Head Coaches use to make has finally trickled down to the assistants.
The lowest paid assistants at the top 30 Division
1-A schools make around $200,000. To show you how far they have come, I made just a little over $200,000 my first year as a Head Coach at Tulane University in 1997. Rich Rodriquez, the Head Coach at the University of Arizona, now making around $3 million, was my offensive coordinator making $75,000.
As I finished reading the article in Tallahassee, a college professor at Florida State commented that he too would like to get a $60,000 raise. With college coaches putting in over 90 hours a week, I’m sure that professor might want to reconsider after putting in a strenuous 30 hour work week. In fact, with football coaches working 3 times longer, that professor making $125,000 are actually overpaid!!!
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