No matter what happened on Super Bowl Sunday, Kansas Chiefs Coach Andy Reid is still money. He is the highest-paid coach in the N.F.L., earning $20 million a year. And his Falstaffian turns alongside his star quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, in those ubiquitous State Farm commercials have made him instantly recognizable, even to nonfootball fans.
Reid’s record suggests he is a bargain: three Super Bowl championships in five trips to the game with the Chiefs. He has also helped transform his small-market team into the league’s star attraction. Nearly 128 million people tuned in to see if the Chiefs could become the first team in N.F.L. history to win a third consecutive Super Bowl. Instead they watched Philadelphia demolish Kansas City, 40-22.
On Tuesday, the New Orleans Saints named the Eagles’ offensive coordinator, Kellen Moore, their new head coach, officially closing the hiring cycle for head coaches this year. Moore, 36, was the seventh coach hired since the end of the regular season, and in each case a team has handed over millions of dollars to the person who it hopes can do for the franchise what Reid has done for Kansas City.
Over the past three decades, the value of N.F.L. franchises has skyrocketed. In 1989, Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys for $140 million. In 2023, the Washington Commanders fetched $6 billion. With the advent of the player salary cap in the mid-1990s, coaches became assets, like practice facilities and team planes, and their average salaries have risen from $300,000 to $6 million a year, according to data compiled by Sportico and Pro Football Reference.
And each off-season, a handful of teams seem ready to empty their pockets in pursuit of the next genius coach.
Last month, the Chicago Bears hired the Detroit Lions’ offensive coordinator, Ben Johnson, 38, for a reported $13 million a year. He was suddenly the seventh-highest-paid N.F.L. coach — $1 million ahead of Baltimore’s John Harbaugh, who has won a Super Bowl, and $1 million behind the 49ers’ Kyle Shanahan, whose team has played for the title twice. According to ESPN, Moore’s annual salary with the Saints would more than double the roughly $2.5 million he was making in Philadelphia.
“There is still a wide range of salaries for head coaches,” said Bob Boland, who has represented coaches as an agent and now is a law professor at Seton Hall University’s Gaming, Hospitality, Entertainment & Sports Law Initiative. “But ever since Sean McVay won the Super Bowl for the Rams, young, innovative offensive coaches have become the archetype for franchises.”
McVay was 33 when he led the Los Angeles Rams to a Super Bowl appearance in 2019 and 36 when the team won the title in 2022. (The Las Vegas Raiders bucked the trend this off-season, hiring the veteran coach Pete Carroll, 73, who will become the oldest head coach in N.F.L. history when the season starts.)
The Jacksonville Jaguars, after 72 hours of intrigue, followed this template and hired Tampa Bay’s offensive coordinator, Liam Coen, 39, for more than $11 million a season. At first, Coen turned down the job and accepted a raise from Tampa that would have made him the highest-paid coordinator in the league at more than $4 million annually. When Jacksonville fired its general manager, however, Coen changed his mind.
“As you continue to do more research and gain more information as you go, it started to become more clear with every hour that this was an opportunity that you just can’t pass up for so many different reasons,” Coen said at his introductory news conference. “Ultimately, you want to do what is best for you and your family. That is what this came down to.”
In the college ranks, things are a little more complicated. The new era of name, image and likeness, known as N.I.L., has meant more money for players, but some of that has come at the expense of head coaches. Sure, Georgia’s Kirby Smart makes more than $13 million a year, and Ohio State Coach Ryan Day recently signed an extension that pays him an average of $12.5 million annually. But with player payrolls for College Football Playoff-caliber teams ranging from $13 million to $20 million, athletic directors are deploying their resources more strategically.
Ohio State paid Chip Kelly, a former head coach at the college and professional levels, $2 million last season to be the Buckeyes’ offensive coordinator. They won the national championship. Penn State, which lost in the semifinals, has since hired Ohio State’s defensive coordinator, Jim Knowles, and will pay him $4 million a year in hopes that he can help the Nittany Lions do the same.
“It’s easier to be an N.F.L. coach now,” said Paul Finebaum, host of his own show on the SEC Network. “You have a set roster, a salary cap and an off-season. For college coaches, it never ends. You are recruiting year-round, watching the transfer portal, keeping your guys out of the transfer portal.”
And now the win-at-all-costs college mentality is costing some coaches money. Florida State Coach Mike Norvell agreed to a one-year restructured contract that includes a $4.5 million contribution to help start a new university initiative aimed, in part, at raising money for revenue sharing and facilities.
Norvell is set to make $9.9 million in 2025 as part of a contract that includes incremental raises every year through 2031. A year after winning the Atlantic Coast Conference championship and finishing 13-1, the Seminoles finished last season 2-10, their worst record since 1974.
“I presented this to our administration in an effort to boost the support of our student-athletes while recognizing that the results and expectations need to be upheld to the highest level,” Norvell said in a statement.
Similarly, Oklahoma State Coach Mike Gundy reduced his $7.75 million annual salary so some of it could be redistributed as part of revenue sharing with players.
“N.I.L. has been disruptive to the coaching class,” Boland said. “I think we are going to see more college coaches going to the N.F.L. as coordinators and head coaches.”
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