Wisconsin takes a pass on paying inflated salary to football coach

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin athletics director Barry Alvarez played football for Nebraska 50 years ago, when Tom Osborne was an assistant coach there. Saturday, Alvarez’s Badgers will play Nebraska on Tom Osborne Field. As it happens, the ex-Wisconsin coach likes to tell a story about a conversation with the ex-Nebraska coach from a time when Osborne was the Cornhuskers’ AD.

“He called and asked if I would share with him what I was paying my coaches, football and basketball,” Alvarez says, leaning back in his office chair. “So I said, ‘Sure,’ and I told him. There was this long hesitation and then Tom said, ‘You and I got out a little too early.’ ”

Alvarez lets loose a long laugh. His last full season coaching Wisconsin football was 2005. USA TODAY Sports began tracking top-tier coaches’ salaries in 2006. The average compensation for head football coaches at 119 major colleges then was roughly $950,000. Today, at 128 Football Bowl Subdivision schools, it is up to just over $2 million.

That means the average compensation package is up more than 110% — and, even adjusting for inflation, has nearly doubled in a decade. The trend to ever-richer contracts boils down to this: Schools frequently pay more, and sometimes much more, to retain a coach or to hire a new one. And that’s where Alvarez is getting the last laugh.

Wisconsin is the anti-trend of compensation inflation. Paul Chryst is making $2.3 million to coach the Badgers this season. That’s the same amount Gary Andersen was set to make at Wisconsin this season, before he left for Oregon State, where he is making $2.45 million. Alvarez did not make a big-money bid to keep Andersen.

Bret Bielema was making $2.64 million at Wisconsin when he left for Arkansas after the 2012 season for a $3.2 million deal. Alvarez hired Andersen from Utah State for far less — $1.8 million. (And if Bielema were still at Wisconsin, he’d be making at least $2.9 million this season.) Chryst’s compensation package is No. 41 among the 52 public schools in the Power Five conferences — and Wisconsin is a rare example of a Power Five school where the football coach is making less today than in 2012.

“I think all our coaches are paid fairly,” Alvarez says. “I don’t pay attention to the trend. We don’t normally look nationally to see where our coaches are ranked. We’ll look in our league.”

Chryst’s compensation ranks No. 9 among the 14 Big Ten schools, where the median salary is $2.5 million. The median is more meaningful in this case because Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh ($7 million, including a $2 million one-time signing bonus) and Ohio State’s Urban Meyer ($5.86 million) skew the average high while Illinois interim coach Bill Cubit ($916,000) skews it low.

Wisconsin chancellor Rebecca Blank criticizes her Big Ten peers who are paying their football coaches so much.

“Those are the choices they make,” she says. “That really begins to threaten the whole sense that we are not professional athletic teams. I’m not terribly happy about the fact that they made those choices. That’s my opinion.”

Alvarez doesn’t share it.

“I look at it as their business,” he says. “I do. I don’t concern myself. I don’t feel like we’re in competition with salaries at Ohio State or Michigan. … When you’re Ohio State and football is as important as it is in that state, and you have an opportunity to hire someone who has a couple of national championships in his hip pocket and is from that state, it makes sense to pay him. He’s that valuable. … And Harbaugh, I think it’s a coup for Michigan and our league. I think he is worthy of that salary. That’s what they can command. The market drives that.”

Blank understands market forces. She was acting secretary of commerce in the Obama administration and holds a doctorate in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Well, clearly the market for football and basketball coaches is a whole lot tighter than the market for chancellors and presidents,” she says, chuckling. Her salary is $499,950.

‘Pretty fortunate’

Chryst’s Badgers are 3-2 and fell out of the top 25 rankings after Saturday’s home loss to Iowa. But fans here will give him time. He’s one of them.

Chryst was born in Madison, 50 years ago next month. His father, George, was an assistant football coach at Wisconsin and a high school football and basketball coach in Madison who’d one day move his family 75 miles west to coach football at Wisconsin-Platteville. As athletics director there, George Chryst hired Bo Ryan, who’d win four Division III national championships in men’s basketball — and who’d go on to be the longtime Wisconsin coach who took the Badgers to the past two Final Fours.

That means Chryst’s father — who died in 1993, at 55 — sired and hired the current coaches of Wisconsin’s top sports. What would he make of that?

“He’d have to do a double take to see Bo coaching basketball and me coaching football” at Wisconsin, Chryst says. “But he’d be proud.”

Chryst played football at Wisconsin, as his father had. And he followed his father into the family business, coaching as an assistant at 10 stops (including college, Canadian Football League and NFL) before arriving at Wisconsin for his second coaching tour of duty in 2005. He was the Badgers’ offensive coordinator before getting the head coaching gig at Pittsburgh in 2012. Three seasons later he’s happy to be back, with a clear understanding that to remain a favorite son his Badgers will have to win.

And for the record, even if Wisconsin represents the anti-trend, Chryst does not think of himself as underpaid — at all.

“My dad would roll over,” he says. “You know what I mean? To get paid to do what you love, pretty fortunate. You can’t say you’re worth that. You’re a lobster at market price, right? There’s value to it, you have an impact on kids, but to say you’re worth that, it’s so wrong. Teachers, nurses — my sister is a pediatrics nurse — that’s real stuff.”

Two brothers also found their callings in sports. Geep Chryst is offensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers and Rick Chryst is former commissioner of the Mid-American Conference.

Chryst learned more than football from his father. He says he also learned coaching is a lucky life: “My dad always used to say, ‘If I can just do this a few more years I will have worked my whole life without ever having a job.’ ”

Call for a salary cap

Blank, chancellor since 2013, has given the issue of coaches’ salaries a good deal of thought — and she offers a radical fix.

“Coaches are being paid, especially in a couple of big sports, increasingly like professional leagues,” she says. “It immediately raises the question of, ‘Why aren’t your athletes being paid similarly?’ If I could redo this, I would try to get some sort of antitrust exemption here and say, ‘We run a college sports program — and college sports programs are different. And we do have the right to cap salaries, given the salary levels that exist elsewhere around the university.’

“And the expectation is that these students are students, as well as athletes, meaning it is not a for-profit program. People who want to make those kinds of salaries need to be in professional sports. I’m a losing voice on that right now. … I don’t think anyone believes it’s going to happen.”

Alvarez dismisses all that as “her opinion. If it’s not going to happen, there’s no use discussing it.”

Blank says she is pleased to be chancellor at a school where she and other officials consider the athletics department to be self-funding. Wisconsin’s athletics department is not one of the two dozen that are self-sufficient by the NCAA’s reckoning of generated revenue versus total expenditure. But Meredith McGlone, UW’s director of news and media relations, says Wisconsin doesn’t use the NCAA’s formula because it doesn’t account for all the funding the athletics department gives back. She says the department didn’t offer methodology or funding numbers, just that it gives back more money than it receives.

Athletics departments typically get money from student fees, university funds and/or government support, but they also send money to their schools through payments for scholarships and facilities and through other transfers. When those amounts are balanced, according to a USA TODAY Sports analysis, all 50 of the public schools that were in a Power Five conference in 2013-14 were self-sufficient.

Wisconsin reported to the NCAA that it provided $8.1 million in forms of university support to the athletics department in 2013-14, and that the department spent a combined total of $52.2 million on scholarships, facilities and other transfers.

“Consistently, year after year, the athletics department has given money back to campus,” Blank says.

Wisconsin’s athletics department says it made a roughly $5 million transfer to the university in 2014-15. Blank says she has asked athletics to raise the amount it gives back by $2 million in the coming year, when the school plans to cut $86 million from its overall budget because of state budget cuts to education that total $250 million statewide this year.

“We are a total university, and I wasn’t going to cut educational programs deeply and leave no cuts elsewhere,” Blank says. “We tried as hard as we can to have everyone share in the cuts, so I asked the athletic department to make a larger contribution back to the university in the next year. They were very willing to do that. That’s a cut for them because it’s money they can’t spend.”

Blank says when she puts her economist’s hat on she sees clear differences between college and pro sports. She says Wisconsin athletics makes money on football and men’s basketball and often men’s hockey — and loses money on 20 other sports.

“Now, if I were running a business, I’d abolish those and run three,” she says. “But I’m not running a business. I’m running a college sports enterprise, among other things. And I think there is an enormous value to athletics and sports for young individuals, both men and women.”

Alvarez says he appreciates the Big Ten’s philosophy of broad-based sports programs.

“Some of the other conferences choose not to do that,” he says. “They’re more focused on football. And basketball, but primarily football. If you have seven fewer sports, you figure, generally speaking — except for football and basketball and, in our case, hockey — generally you’re going to lose $2 million per sport.

“So if you’ve got seven fewer sports, and you’ve got the same size stadium and everything equal to us — that money can go wherever you choose it to go. … And that may be one of the reasons why you have a big discrepancy in salaries. They have more of an availability because they have fewer sports.”

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Living his dream

When you enter Gate 1 at Camp Randall Stadium, there’s a bronze statue of Alvarez. So, what’s it like to pass a bronze likeness of yourself on the way into the office every morning?

“I need a smart answer to that,” Alvarez says, “but I don’t have one.”

The other statue at Gate 1 is of Pat Richter, an All-America tight end at Wisconsin who would go on to careers in the NFL and in business before becoming Wisconsin’s athletics director in 1989. The next year he hired Alvarez, then Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator, as Wisconsin’s football coach. Alvarez turned a moribund program into a multiple Rose Bowl winner and eventually succeeded Richter as athletics director.

That’s Alvarez’s goal: Hire a football coach who wins Rose Bowls and maybe gets his own statue at Gate 1 someday.

“Hope so,” Alvarez says, grinning.

Alvarez already achieved an overarching lifetime goal. The late Bob Devaney was his coach at Nebraska who ascended to the athletics director’s chair.

“He’s the one I patterned my career after,” Alvarez says. “When I was a high school coach, people would ask me my goals, and I’d say, ‘I want to be like Coach Devaney.’ I’d say I was going to be a Division I head coach and go someplace, turn a program around and sustain it and take over as an AD, so someday someone can say, ‘You built that program.’ That was my goal.”

It’s still his program. When Bielema left, and again when Andersen left, Alvarez stepped in to coach the team’s bowl games. He makes the hires when coaches leave. And his track record is good. Bielema was 68-24 at Wisconsin and Andersen was 19-7, with frequent sellouts of Camp Randall’s 80,321 seats.

The goal now is for Chryst to succeed — and to stay. If another school comes after him, the buyout is $6 million within the first two years of the agreement on a sliding scale to $3 million during the fourth or fifth years. Wisconsin got a $3 million buyout from Oregon State when Andersen left and paid Pitt $3.28 million for Chryst’s buyout. Wisconsin got $1 million from Arkansas for Bielema’s buyout and paid $236,000 in connection with Andersen’s buyout from Utah State.

“We just feel like we’re protecting ourselves,” Alvarez says of the $6 million buyout clause. “It’s expensive to change coaches. You’re paying out assistant coaches who aren’t retained. You’re paying new assistants to come in and move their families. To do all that is very expensive.”

Wisconsin has had to do that twice in recent years.

“Yeah, but the one thing we haven’t had to do is pay liquidated damages on a coach,” Alvarez says. “That’s also very expensive, when you let a coach go.”

Contributing: Jodi Upton