College football coach pay is soaring − even at basketball schools

John Calipari had been the highest-paid public employee in the state of Kentucky since the day he was hired to coach the state’s flagship men’s basketball program in 2009.

But this year, that’s changed. 

After being the state’s top earner for nearly 14 years running, Calipari recently ceded his salary crown to the Wildcats’ football coach, Mark Stoops.

Stoops, who has been at Kentucky since 2013, signed a mammoth contract extension in November that effectively gave him a 33% raise, bumping his pay up to $9 million annually. Calipari, who is the highest-paid coach in college hoops, is due to make $8.5 million this year.

“Continuity has become more and more important in today’s landscape,” Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart said in a statement announcing Stoops’ extension. 

And make no mistake: That landscape has shifted. 

Now, even at hoops-crazed universities such as Kentucky, college football is king − at least when it comes to coaching pay.

As part of its annual analysis of college football coaches’ compensation published Tuesday, USA TODAY Sports found that the public schools in the Power Five conferences will pay their head coaches an average of $6.2 million this year − which marks a whopping 14.3% increase from 2022, among schools that were in the Power Five in both years.

It’s also nearly double the average salary ($3.35 million) that those same schools paid their head coaches in men’s basketball, the other major revenue-generating sport, in 2022-23.

“When it comes to football coaching salaries at the top level, university presidents decided that they would follow the pro model. Everything else is structured in a different model,” said Amy Privette Perko, the chief executive officer of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a college sports watchdog organization. “And frankly, that’s what’s causing the model to rip apart at the seams.”

With a football-fueled surge in conference television rights payments, and a new deal for College Football Playoff rights on the horizon, it may come as no surprise that the head football coach is now making more money than his men’s basketball counterpart at most Power Five schools. But data indicates that gap has actually become more like a gulf − even at schools like Kentucky, North Carolina and UCLA, which have built a reputation as college basketball’s “blue bloods.”

USA TODAY Sports compiled school pay figures for the head football and men’s basketball coaches at a select group of schools with a rich tradition in hoops − every public-school program that has won a national title in men’s hoops since the expansion of the NCAA tournament in 1985. The data shows that in 2010, men’s basketball coaches at those 15 schools made $10.3 million more, cumulatively, than their football counterparts. This year, they are due to make $18.8 million less.

Only two of the 15 schools − Arizona and Connecticut − are paying the men’s basketball coach more than…