Coaches' salaries, scandals both on the rise

Once a profession of high esteem and low pay, coaching is a hot job even in these days of endless scandals.

Top NFL coaches make $5 million a year, NBA coaches up to $6 million. In colleges, top football coaches make as much as $2.4 million, basketball coaches $2.2 million. The $10 million-a-year coach is coming in a few years, the $100 million long-term deal probably by the decade's end.

Waistlines and muscles don't matter, as Bill Parcells and Jeff Van Gundy can attest. Team owners and college presidents, their player budgets maxed out by salary caps and scholarships, are shelling out bundles for coaches who can win without breaking too many rules.

Among all the clods and clowns giving the business a bad name, there are yet more than a few who know the difference between a phony image and true character. For every Jim Harrick and Larry Eustachy, there's a Mike Krzyzewski and a Tubby Smith and dozens of other less famous but no less genuine leaders.

Baylor's Dave Bliss is the latest, and arguably the most vile, coach in the bum-of-the-month club that has fallen this year. Mike Price at Alabama and "Slick" Rick Neuheisel at Washington were merely foolish. It doesn't get much sleazier than Bliss desperately trying to save his job with lies that smeared the name of a murdered player, Patrick Dennehy.

The rotten coaches are causing a lot of grief for their colleagues. Yet the profession has never been stronger as far as salaries. Maybe the two go hand-in-hand.

The standard for a coach

The most honorable of all coaches, 92-year-old John Wooden, believes the deceits and shenanigans in coaching are no different from those in politics or business. Standards, says the former UCLA coach and recent winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, should be higher all around.

Wooden is both a client and a mentor to Gary O'Hagan, manager of the coaches division of the influential International Management Group, which represents more than 40 college and pro coaches. IMG's NFL list including Detroit's Steve Mariucci, San Diego's Marty Schottenheimer, Oakland's Bill Callahan and Jacksonville's Jack Del Rio.

When O'Hagan makes a pitch to coaches he wants to represent, he likes to finish with a quote from Wooden: "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts."

"When I say that I like to see how they react," O'Hagan says. "If they react with some bit of confusion, they're going to be a problem. But if they understand that, they've got a good chance of being successful."

O'Hagan has been seeing a lot of well-educated, smart, young people, undeterred by the scandals, look at coaching as a career.

"It's going to make it more competitive," O'Hagan says.

Coaching already is competitive, if not cutthroat.

In a survey of 110 NCAA Division I football coaches, O'Hagan says average salaries are $594,000 and the high is $2.4 million. The highest paid conference is the Big 12, he says, where the average salary among head coaches is $1.18 million. Bob Stoops of top-ranked Oklahoma and Mack Brown of Texas make more than twice that.

In the NFL, Mariucci and Steve Spurrier lead with $5 million salaries, a notch above Mike Holmgren and Mike Shanahan. The average NFL head coaching salary is $2.73 million.

"All levels of coaching compensation are moving up," O'Hagan says. "There's a high school football coach here in Minnesota making more than $90,000.

"If I were going to pick a market that is really going to zoom, it's the NFL. So many games are decided by three points or less. And the difference between making the playoffs and not means so much that the owners feel that the edge is the coach."

The salary cap restricts how much teams can play players. But there are no restrictions on salaries for coaches.

The pressure to get to the top of coaching and to stay there may lead some to break the rules along the way. The ones who sacrifice scruples or get themselves in trouble off the field, like Price and Neuheisel, are the ones O'Hagan tries to avoid.

"I would be loath to work with them," he says. "It comes down to the time commitment it would take to work with somebody with problems of that nature, and the message it would send to other coaches we're recruiting."

IMG is looking for coaches in the Wooden mold -- smart, decent men and women who are strong leaders, compelling speakers and potential broadcasters or authors.

"Does Mike Price currently fit into that mold? I don't think he does," O'Hagan says.

There aren't many coaches who live up to the standards Wooden set, but anyone even close is a godsend these days when competition is so intense and morals are so low. Those with even a few ounces of integrity are quite literally worth more than their weight in gold.

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Steve Wilstein is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at swilstein (at) ap.org