Highest Paid College Football Coaches

Watching college football is a favorite national past-time in America. Stadiums are crowded on weekends with citizens enjoying these matches after having partied harder on Friday nights. For many of us, American football brings back the memories of reckless days of college where passion, intensity and the spirit to play for our respective teams was no less than a fervor. This was the emotional aspect of college football. In retrospect, if we analyze the business and commercial aspect of college football we'll discover that it has grown as an exciting business opportunity. For the prestigious National Football League (NFL), college football matches, players and coaches, are sources of talent in abundance. Moreover, in states where the popularity of NFL teams is low, college football scores high in fame and fortune. The NCCA, the governing body for college football matches has worked hard to improve prospects of college football. The Bowl Championship Series (BCS), with more than a decades existence is followed as crazily by Americans. Some of highest paid college football coaches earn seven figure income and this stands proof to the fact that college football is extremely lucrative.

Highest Earning College Football Coaches

As per the latest news available in the first week of January 2011, from several sources, Stanford Cardinal coach Jim Harbaugh may become the highest paid coach in NFL, as he has been offered a contract of more than $8 millions for becoming the coach of Miami Dolphins. That is the case of NFL coaches, however, the deal isn't bad for college football coaches. In a report compiled by the esteemed USA today, in September 2010, following is the list of top 10 highest paid college football coaches, based on their total compensation package. These salaries were analyzed by USA today from all 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision. Almost all coaches are also awarded whopping money as bonus packages that can increase their salary to higher levels. In the list presented below, however, we have only given the list for 2010, based on total compensation received by the football coaches. To view a detailed list, you need to go to the official website of USA today. On the compensation scale, these are the college football coaches who're making huge sum of money.

1. Nick Saban, University of Alabama ~ $5,997,349
2. Mack Brown, University of Texas ~ $5,161,500
3. Bob Stoops, University of Oklahoma ~ $4,375,000
4. Urban Meyer, University of Florida (retired) ~ $4,010,000
5. Les Miles, Louisiana State University ~ $3,905,000
6. Jim Tressel, Ohio State University ~ $3,888,389
7. Kirk Ferentz, University of Iowa ~ $3,781,000
8. Jim Grobe, Wake Forest University ~ $2,939,475
9. Mark Richt, University of Georgia ~ $2,937,740
10. Bobby Petrino, University of Arkansas ~ $2,713,000

As we can see, at the top of the above list is Nick Saban and he is indisputably, one of the most powerful sports coaches in American sports history. On the cover of Forbes magazine's September 2008 issue, Nick Saban was called "The Most Powerful Coach in Sports". Earlier he has been a coach to NFL team, The Miami Dolphins and 3 university teams; namely LSU, Michigan State and Toledo. At present, he is the head of Alabama University's Crimson Tide football team.

As we can see in the above list of top earning football coaches, whopping salaries are awarded to these coaches and so it takes us to the age-old debate, 'are these coaches worth these salaries'. Moreover, understanding the terms like "base salary", 'compensation", "bonus", non-compensation" is not easy for the common man. Nonetheless, given the huge expectations of fans, they carry on their shoulders, it is surely worth the price.