When football coaches get new jobs and change teams in the ever-churning coaching carousel at the college level, one of the most notable things that fans and media members often end up looking at after the hire is complete is the compensation that your school is giving up.
Sometimes it’s an astronomical amount, like Alabama’s Nick Saban, who reportedly made $10.95 million in 2022 alone. Other times it seems far more reasonable. Often, though, the base salary is just part of the overall contract, though. While many coaches work for an annual salary, there are almost always incentives and bonuses that come along if certain milestones are met. Those incentives can kick in if the team becomes bowl eligible, reaches a conference championship game, or sometimes even if they simply beat their biggest rival.
For coaches at public universities, this information is made known through records requests, but the same can’t be said for private universities. Now that the 2022 season is behind us, USA TODAY went through and tallied up the incentives and bonuses that were made over the last year, taking a look at which coaches made off the best when all was said and done.
Our eyes immediately went to the coaches in the Pac-12. Here are how the coaches out west fared when it came to contract bonuses.