Being a big-time college basketball ball head coach can be very lucrative, especially at some of the most storied programs in the country. The money might not be as stratospheric as college football, but there’s no doubt that the salaries keep rising.
And, the Big Ten is no different. Some of the most iconic coaches in college basketball have called the conference home in years past, and that continues through to today.
USA TODAY releases its coaches’ salaries database for football annually and has just released the same for basketball. If you ever wondered what the pecking order is in the Big Ten when it comes to paying coaches, you are in luck because we’re taking a journey through the conference to rank the salaries in the Big Ten from the lowest salary to the top.
Being an Ohio State fan site, of course, we are interested in what Chris Holtmann is making and where it falls in the landscape of the conference, but it’s interesting regardless to see who has shelled out the most money.
Before we go through all of this, some quick housecleaning type things to get out of the way according to the USA TODAY database:
“The information below applies to the data obtained for the 2022 contract season: To see the methodology behind this data, click here.
“Where the table does not display a number, it means the amount could not be obtained. Asterisk means additional information about the coach’s compensation is available by clicking on the number shown.
‘”Buyout Owed”‘ figures are the amount a school would owe coach if it fired coach without cause on April 1, 2022. Many of these amounts are expressly subject to coach’s duty to make good-faith efforts to find another job, with income from that employment offsetting the amount owed. If mitigation and offset are not addressed in a contract, coach still may have obligation to make efforts in that regard. The amount listed may be owed to coach over an extended period of time, rather than as a lump sum at termination.
“Coaches’ records are going into 2021-22 season, compiled by Cale Clinton from information displayed in NCAA statistics database at stats.ncaa.org – so they may be impacted by games vacated or forfeited by the NCAA or the schools.”