It is time to put Nick Saban’s salary package so far out of reach that even the 10-gallon hats in the Lone Star State would gulp at the prospect.
Incredibly, there was a time when Nick Saban was considered overpaid as the Alabama football coach.
Seriously.
Saban’s initial eight-year, $32 million contract (an actual pay cut from his Miami Dolphins salary, but that’s another story …) became a national kerfluffle when it was revealed.
“Too much money!”, they crowed.
“No one is worth that much!”, the pundits railed.
“Think of the poor professors!”, the academia whined.
In 2008, a year before Saban’s Tide won the first of four national championships during his tenure, Forbes magazine postulated that Saban’s deal (the highest ever paid to a college football coach at the time) made him The Most Powerful Coach in Sports.
Six years and more trophies than a school already embarrassingly rich in trophies could handle, Forbes said in February of this year that Alabama generated almost $100 MILLION on football in 2015, and PROFITED over $46 million. In one year.
Given the four national titles and a re-read of that last sentence, anyone want to kvetch that the original $4 million per for Saban’s services wasn’t an absolute steal by athletic director Mal Moore and president Robert Witt?
The Khaki Effect
Flashing forward to present day, as Nick Saban and Alabama merrily chug along as defending national champions/college football behemoth/worthy competition of the Cleveland Browns with NC No. 5/17 in the cross-hairs … Nick Saban isn’t even the highest paid coach in college football.
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That honor belongs to Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, who apparently is earning somewhere north of $9 million to bring the Wolverines out of the shadow of their Buckeye foes and into the national elite.
That is a lot of Domino’s Pizza and Adidas gear.
Don’t get confused, dear reader. We believe in supply and demand with the best of them. And your humble scribe has never been confused with a savvy negotiator. But if Harbaugh is currently worth over 9 MILLION AMERICAN DOLLAR BILLS, it begs this question …
How much is Nick Saban REALLY worth to Alabama?
The answer, of course, is almost impossible to quantify.
First, no one is exactly sponsoring telethons for Saban. At $6.93 million of base pay and on-field/academic performance bonuses that pushed him over $7 million last year, Saban has plenty of dough to keep his JetSkis on Lake Burton fueled and maintained.
And Harbaugh’s gaudy pile of cash is partially due to a complex loan agreement that fulfilled the university’s contractual pledge to “determine an appropriate deferred compensation arrangement” for Harbaugh after he completed his first season as the Wolverines’ coach. Under the deal, the university is making a series of $2 million payments as premiums on a life insurance policy that Harbaugh owns and from which he can make withdrawals or loans. (The university will get its money back, without interest, under a variety of scenarios, the most basic of which would be when Harbaugh dies.)
In other words, Harbaugh actually “makes” $5 million a year. That is still a LOT of money for a coach with precisely zero Big 10 or national titles on his resume. Because the first of those $2 million insurance policies came as part of his contract this June and another is due in December, that adds up to a tidy $9 million this season.
Or, doing the math, that is enough for 257,216 pair of Dockers khaki pants ($34.99 at your local JCPenney).
Boiling it down, Michigan is essentially betting future windfalls from potential on-field success with Harbaugh. The more the Wolverines win and earn money + the longer Harbaugh stays alive and active = lots of Benjamins!
What Saban Is Actually Worth
Once the shockwaves of Harbaugh’s new deal washed over the Alabama nation and settled to ripples on the shoreline (Meh, beat Ohio State and Michigan State in the same season, not less make the College Football Playoff), the collective mind turns to the question of how much Nick Saban is actually worth.
Betsided
Look, Saban isn’t at the stage of his Hall of Fame career where money is the driving factor (sorry, Jimmy Sexton …), or else he would be wearing burnt orange and have a 24/7 camera following him around for the Longhorn Network. Sadly for pizza lovers in West Alabama, too, there is no equivalent to what Domino’s does in helping fuel the Michigan money train.
But along with oversized rings and the need to buy more flagpoles for the North End Zone of Bryant-Denny Stadium, money is one of the ways Sexton’s clients keep score.
And Alabama is awash with cash, both in the athletic department as as a university – with Saban as the man to thank for most all of it. The athletic department’s $95,132,301 revenue in 2015 (the most ever by any single team in the history of college sports) allows Saban’s program to hire a small army of quality control experts and layers of recruiting that make every other program in America drool.
But with a net 2015 profit of nearly $46.5 million during the Tide’s 2015 championship season (which was actually down nearly $7 million from the year before), surely there is a cushy “insurance policy” for Saban like Harbaugh has.
While Sexton’s dialing fingers get itchy even thinking about this thought, it is incumbent upon current athletic director Bill Battle to step forward and further etch Nick Saban’s status as THE elite coach in college football history with some more zeros.
It is time to put Saban’s salary package so far out of reach that even the 10-gallon hats in the Lone Star State would gulp at the prospect.
It is time to put our money where our mouth is, and keep Miss Terry in enough spending cash for a hundred lifetimes.
Next: Nick Saban's Legacy: MTAQ
If we can’t pay him eleventy billion dollars, or as a good friend says “ALL the dollars!”, it is certainly time to make it right.
It is time to make Nick Saban the $15 Million Dollar Coach.