Most Expensive College Football Coach Salary

The accelerating popularity of college football in the past decade has led to much more expensive salaries for successful head coaches. As a college football program can in fact be one of the most lucrative sources of income for a university, coaches can be afforded a much more expensive salary than even their most successful NFL counterparts. Though NFL head coaches generally make in the realm of 1 to 2 million dollars a year, the highest paid college football coaches make over 3 million dollars annually. In fact, as of November 2006, 41 collegiate football head coaches had salaries of more than a million dollars per year.

Which college football coach has the highest salary? Oklahoma University’s Bob Stoops has dwarfed the average in pulling in the most expensive college football coach salary, an estimated 3.45 million dollars annually.

Stoops began his tenure at the reigns of the storied Oklahoma football program when he was hired as head coach in 1999. Previously, he had lent his knowledge of defense to Steve Spurrier’s program at the University of Florida, where his impact was immediately felt- Florida won the national championship in 1996, Stoops’ first year as defensive coordinator. In 2000, Stoops proved again that he could produce results with haste, coaching the Oklahoma Sooners to their seventh overall national championship and their first since 1985. The highest paid college football coach has led Oklahoma to an 86-18 record in his tenure, the best record of any BCS affiliated school since 1999.

The reasons for the university’s willingness to pay such an exorbitant contract relate mainly to the history of the program and the respect that Sooners football commands in the football world. Oklahoma University was founded in 1890, and the Sooners played their first game in 1895, 12 years before Oklahoma had even achieved statehood. The Sooners have captured the championship title in six different conferences since 1915, including four Big 12 championships under Stoops. Though rumors have been swirling for years about Stoops’ imminent defection to the NFL, his reasons for staying put at the University of Oklahoma are obvious. Not only does the entire coaching world marvel at his win-loss record, they’re green with envy for his expensive coaching salary.

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