01 · Leader
Kirby Smart
Georgia Bulldogs
$13.28M
$13,282,580 · school-reported ↗
2015Since
25Jet hours
$105.11MBuyout
Home›Contracts
Head-coach contracts
What every FBS head coach is owed, and what his contract actually says
Each row is the best figure available for the year the coach is in now — read off his contract where we hold it, taken from the school's own disclosure where we do not. Open a coach to see the clauses quoted verbatim with their page numbers, including the ones that hand him a plane.
138Programs
106With pay on file
93With buyout terms
12Contracts on file
Annual pay for the year each coach is in now: the contract's own figure where we hold the document, the school's disclosure otherwise. Not realized W-2 compensation. 139 of these coaches are currently in the job; 10 have a quantified personal-aircraft grant we can quote. 7 of the ranked figures on this tab are read off a contract we hold; the rest are school-reported.
02 · Challenger
Lane Kiffin
LSU Tigers
$13.00M
$13,000,000 · contract →
2025Since
65Jet hours
$36.60MBuyout
03 · Contender
Ryan Day
Ohio State Buckeyes
$12.57M
$12,575,000 · school-reported ↗
2018Since
50Jet hours
$70.92MBuyout
Rank / coachTotal paySource
How to read these rankings
Every row carries the best figure available for the coach in that job today, and the source column says which kind it is. Contractmeans the number was read off a filed document we hold, at the page the coach's own page cites, for the contract year he is in now. School-reportedmeans it comes from the school's disclosure in USA TODAY's coaches salary database for the most recent fiscal year on file.
The two are not perfectly comparable, and mixing them is a deliberate trade. A contract states scheduled pay for a contract year; USA TODAY reports one fiscal year of pay to whoever held the job, so a coach who changed schools carries his previous employer's figure there. Ranking a coach on last year's pay for a job he no longer holds is a worse error than ranking two measurements a few percent apart, so the document wins and the row says so.
Neither figure is realized compensation. Form 990 totals for private schools measure something different again — actual W-2 pay, on a different calendar — and are never blended into these columns.
A buyout is a liability, not a payment. It is the contractual maximum a school would owe on a termination without cause, before offset, mitigation, or the negotiated settlement that usually follows. When a settlement is documented, it replaces the gross figure on that coach's page. Some contracts state the school's obligation as a percentage of the pay remaining rather than a dollar amount; those rows fall back to the school-reported figure, and where there is none they show the formula instead of a number nobody printed.
Jet-hours rows count only contracts we hold and have quoted. A coach missing from that tab has no documented grant in this corpus — not necessarily no aircraft use. Figures marked reported come from published reporting rather than a primary document we hold, and are labeled as such wherever they appear.
Fiscal years are not uniform across schools, and a coach hired or fired mid-year can carry a figure that covers only part of the season. Treat cross-school gaps of a few percent as noise rather than signal.