Chris Klieman
The numbers
$5.25M
$5,250,000
USA TODAY salary database, FY2025
$5.25M
$5,250,000
USA TODAY salary database, FY2025
$1.55M
$1,550,000
USA TODAY salary database, FY2025
$29.63M
$29,625,000
USA TODAY salary database, FY2025
These are school-reported contract terms, not realized compensation, and the buyout is a contractual maximum rather than money paid. Source ↗
Status
Retired, effective 2025-12-03. The contract carried a stated buyout of $29.63M; any negotiated settlement replaces that figure once documented.
The fine print
No contract for Chris Klieman is in this corpus yet, so there is nothing to quote. The figures above come from the school's own salary disclosure.
The flights
Published reporting on Kansas State Wildcats aircraft during this tenure:
A jet clause is eligibility; a tracked flight is evidence; the join is presented as contract-next-to-reporting, never as proof the coach was aboard.
How this page is sourced
Where a contract for this coach is in the corpus, the headline figures are read off that document at the page each card cites, and USA TODAY's figure runs alongside as a cross-check. Where no contract is held, the figures are school-reported contract terms from USA TODAY's coaches salary database for the most recent fiscal year on file. Neither is W-2 compensation, and neither is comparable to Form 990 totals for private schools.
Clause text is transcribed verbatim from the cited document at the cited page. Where a term is attributed to published reporting rather than a document we hold, the card says so explicitly.
Flight reports linked here are attributed to the program and the date, not to a passenger. Nothing on this page claims a coach exercised a clause or was aboard an aircraft.