Yesterday, USA Today released their bulk list of college athletic director salaries. The publication has opened a window into the world of collegiate athletics budgets, coaching salaries and they are doing the same with respect to the administrators behind the scenes now. Athletic directors are the coach's boss. They run the show from a hiring, firing and fundraising standpoint. The ADs are the guys who handle the dirty business of scandal as we've seen with Jeff Long at Arkansas.
Last night, Michigan State's Mark Hollis won the Sports Business Athletic Director of the Year award for his work with the Spartans. Hollis makes $395,000 a year, quite the pretty penny in "normal" America. However, in looking at Jeff Long and Dave Brandon, two of the athletic directors he beat out for the award, we see that Hollis is not exactly at the top of the pay scale as far as athletic directors go. Long, at $562,900 and Brandon, at $700,454, outpace the East Lansing athletic director. That said, Long and Brandon are not even at the top of the athletic director heap when it comes to salaries.
As far as coaches go, we all tend to know who is going to be the highest paid commodity on the sideline. The guys who win, Nick Saban, Mack Brown, Les Miles and Urban Meyer to name a few, make the big bucks and everyone else falls in line behind them.
However, gauging the highest paid athletic directors is a much more complicated task. In fact, in looking at the salaries there are instances where it is next to impossible to determine why some make far more money than others. Certainly Florida's Jeremy Foley, Texas' DeLoss Dodds, Wisconsin's Barry Alvarez and Notre Dame's Jack Swarbrick are expected to be near the top.
Those schools have massive athletic departments, big budgets and a lot of success. Joining these big-name departments are guys like Navy's Chet Gladchuk and Duke's Kevin White, both ahead of the aforementioned Dave Brandon at Michigan.
Brandon is not the only big name passed by a lesser athletic department. In fact, everyone sits behind Vanderbilt's David Williams, and it is not even close. The Commodores athletic director makes $2,560,505 a year, that's a million more than the second place Foley.
With the exception of the schools on the low end of the economic scale in football, the Sun Belt, MWC and the MAC among others, there really is no sure measure to predict where teams fall outside of the Top 12-15 schools. Wake Forest is ahead of Texas A&M. Boston College is ahead of Alabama and Arkansas.
One thing that should be noted, the bonuses. There are schools that have a lot of extra money wrapped into their bonus packages for the athletic director. These bonuses yield escalators when collected and some athletic directors, such as NC State's Debbie Yow, can go from being in the middle of the pack to closer to the top as far as cash is concerned.
The most interesting revelation in all of this is not the disparity between the numbers at the schools. Rather, the biggest reveal I've seen in looking at the numbers is the massive chasm between the service academies.
Air Force, in the Mountain West, pays their athletic director $165,300 a year. That's near the bottom of the reported salaries. Army, an Independent, is not much better as their athletic director makes $233,500 a year. Combined, both Army and Air Force do not pay their athletic director nearly as much as the Naval Academy. Chet Gladchuk makes $712,742 in Annapolis. Why he is paid so much more than his Army and Air Force counterparts is definitely not clear.
