Wednesday, May. 30, 2007

On the rise

With the salaries of head football coaches reaching the $4 million mark, it's not surprising that salaries for assistants are also skyrocketing

Twenty years ago, Auburn offensive coordinator Al Borges embarked on the same job at Portland State, a Division II college.

A young man who hadn’t been in the collegiate coaching ranks long, Borges said he earned a whopping $20,000 in his first year.

It’s a long way from where he is now as he enters his fourth year at Auburn. Borges is second in the Southeastern Conference among offensive coordinators with a base salary of $325,000. That trails only LSU’s Gary Crowton, who will make $400,000 this year.

"The market value for assistant coaches has gone up, like head coaches," Borges said. "When you’re breaking in, they tell you if you want to be a football coach, you seldom make the money. In the early part of my career, I didn’t make much money. You just hope you catch up to it."

Borges makes more than double the salary of Bobby Petrino, $150,000, when he served in the same capacity at Auburn in 2002. His salary is also well above the $190,000 he received when he first joined Auburn's staff. A 1999 study by USA Today showed there were just five college head coaches who made $1 million per year. Now, college football has its first $4 million man, Alabama’s Nick Saban.

The typical college football assistant now easily earns more than a professor at his university. Across the SEC, average salaries for professors range from $57,000 for an assistant professor to as high as $135,000 for a full professor, according to the latest information provided by the American Association of University Professors.

League-wide, SEC athletic directors and coaches say they will wait to see what impact Saban’s contract will have on the rest of the league — as well as the rest of the country.

"It will be interesting to see," Auburn athletic director Jay Jacobs said. "I don’t think you can judge the market on one particular move. We’ll see how it impacts the next few hires."

In addition to Saban’s new contract, the SEC boasts four coaches who make as much as $2 million per year, including Auburn’s Tommy Tuberville, Georgia’s Mark Richt, Florida’s Urban Meyer and Tennessee’s Phillip Fulmer. South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier, Arkansas’ Houston Nutt and LSU’s Les Miles all make more than $1.5 million and are closing in on the $2 million mark.

The Ledger-Enquirer compiled salaries from 10 of the 12 SEC schools. Alabama has not completed contracts for Saban’s staff and Vanderbilt, a private university, is not bound by the Freedom of Information Act to disclose such information.

The league average for assistant coaching staffs is more than $1.5 million per year, closing in on the typical salaries for head coaches. Not including Alabama, which is believed to have a $2 million budget for its assistants, LSU has the highest budget for its assistants at $1.88 million, closely followed by Auburn with $1.87 million.

Of the 10 schools providing salary figures, Mississippi State ranks last, although its $1 million budget doesn’t include the salaries of three coaches who were either recently hired or received increases with new duties. South Carolina has a budget of $1.3 million for its assistants.