Imagine being the athletics director of a school in the Sun Belt, Mid-American Conference or even Conference USA. Your head football coach has just left or been fired, meaning it’s time to go into coaching search mode.
Like any good AD, you’ve been monitoring the landscape, knowing this day could come. You’ve made a list of the brightest young assistant coaches in the country ready for head coaching jobs, and if you get lucky you might become a launching pad the next Urban Meyer, who got his start at Bowling Green, or Gus Malzahn, who went from Auburn’s offensive coordinator to Arkansas State’s head coach.
But the landscape for assistant coaches has changed rapidly, particularly for those who work in the so-called Power Five conferences. Pay for assistant coaches at top programs has become so good — including multi-year, guaranteed contracts in many cases — that there is often little financial incentive to take jobs at smaller schools where they can prove themselves as head coaches.
As a result, the entire way athletics directors at smaller schools now approach coaching searches has changed.
It used to be that almost any head coaching job in the FBS was considered more attractive than a coordinator position, but as the financial gap has grown between the Power Five and the so-called Group of Five conferences — which includes the American Athletic, Conference USA, Mid-American, Mountain West and Sun Belt — teams competing for national championships have placed significant value on coordinators.
The average assistant coaching salary in the SEC this year came in just over $449,000, a number that eclipses 12 FBS head coaches, including Northern Illinois’ Rod Carey and Dino Babers, whose move from Bowling Green to Syracuse became official on Saturday.
The average assistant coach salary for all FBS coaches was $245,000, according to an analysis by USA TODAY Sports.
Pay for C-USA head coaches averaged $628,000 this year, while the Sun Belt’s head coaches averaged $542,000. There are 57 assistants at public schools in the Power Five conferences who made more.
As an athletics director at a Group of Five school said, most assistants want to be a head coach but understandably find it difficult to pass up a guaranteed multi-year contract that can worth around $750,000 annually to be a coordinator for a Power Five school. The AD asked not to be identified because he has been through a coaching search recently.
Of the 19 head coaching vacancies filled so far during this hiring cycle, 12 have been assistants from Power Five schools. Among those, four were hired by Power Five schools as head coaches and four more were promoted from within.
Only four Power Five assistants have taken head coaching jobs outside the Power Five: Scott Frost (Oregon offensive coordinator to Central Florida), Mike Norvell (Arizona State offensive coordinator to Memphis), Mike Jinks (Texas Tech associate head coach/running backs to Bowling Green) and Seth Littrell (North Carolina assistant head coach/tight ends to North Texas).
Last year, just five Power Five assistants took head coaching jobs outside the Power Five, three of whom landed in the American Athletic Conference (Houston’s Tom Herman, Tulsa’s Phil Montgomery and SMU’s Chad Morris). In Morris’ case, it took a financial commitment of $2 million per year from SMU to lure him from Clemson, where he was making $1.3 million as offensive coordinator.
While schools in the American seemingly have the resources to lure highly-paid assistants such as Morris and Norvell (who was making $950,000 at Arizona State), most other Group of Five schools do not.
There’s even been movement the other way: Central Michigan head coach Dan Enos got a $190,000 raise last year to leave and become Arkansas’ offensive coordinator, while Garrick McGee left a head coaching job at UAB following the 2013 season to become Louisville’s offensive coordinator. After Bill Cubit was fired at Western Michigan in 2012, he landed at Illinois as offensive coordinator and actually saw his salary increase from $380,000 to $400,000.
The impact of that trend is that college football hiring season has almost separated into two pools. The hottest coordinators are either going to take a head coaching job in the American or wait for a Power Five gig to open, while schools in other leagues generally have to look at a completely different group of candidates.
One athletics director said unless a school could pay more than $750,000 for a head coach, it would be more likely these days to either promote from within or look to a lower division for coaching talent than go grab an assistant out of the Power Five.
Recent examples of that would be Buffalo hiring Lance Leipold last year out of Div. 3 Wisconsin-Whitewater, UNLV hiring a high school coach in Tony Sanchez and Wyoming grabbing Craig Bohl out of FCS power North Dakota State.
Either way, the days of high-profile assistants clamoring for any head coaching jobs they can find appear to be over. And everyone in the business of hiring coaches has had to adjust.
