Yesterday, USA Today released their annual list of assistant coach salaries.
David Gibbs continues to be the highest paid assistant and 2017 is the last year of his two year deal with Texas Tech. He will need to be resigned and most likely will command a raise. Eric Morris is the highest paid offensive assistant and I honestly had no idea or maybe just forgot that Joe Robinson made as much money as he did. To explain the chart, the first column on the left is the rank amongst NCAA assistant coaches. The first monetary column is the actual salary and the second column is what the university pays. The third monetary column is the maximum bonus payments. I would think you’d have to dig into each contract to determine how coaches earn those bonus payments. The final monetary column is the total assistant coach pool.
This brings up another sore subject, which is that most likely, Texas Tech is the Big 12 program that pays the least amount to assistant coaches in the Big 12. I write most likely because TCU and Baylor are not required to provide their coach salaries because they are private institutions. Still, you can bet that Texas Tech pays the lowest amount in the Big 12.
- Texas: $4,600,000
- Oklahoma: $4,310,000
- Oklahoma State: $3,641,314
- West Virginia: $3,107,000
- Kansas State: $3,001,600
- Kansas: $2,958,599
- Iowa State: $2,492,250
- Texas Tech: $2,395,000
One other note is that USA Today also has their list of top paid strength coaches and Rusty Whitt comes in at #40 overall, making $200,000.
This is where we go off on the rant about how you get what you pay for when it comes to assistant coaches. That’s absolutely true and I’d guess that if Kingsbury had a bigger pool, then he would have more opportunity for better assistants. This was something that was negotiated when Kingsbury was retained and I would hope that he would negotiate a bigger pool for his assistants the next contract he negotiates. It will be interesting to see how much Kingsbury will have to pay for the new 10th assistant because if, and this is a big IF, Kingsbury is going to pay a real-deal offensive coordinator, then Texas Tech will need to pay the same range as David Gibbs, which is $550,000 to $600,000. The question will be if the athletic department will approve that sort of expenditure.