Compensation of College Football’s Head Coaches: A Case Study in Firm Size’s Effects on Pay, pp. 224-235

W. Jennings Byrd
Phillip A. Mixon
Alan Wright

Top management pay and firm size has been well documented. We explore a variation of this relationship by extending it to college sports. College football is big business, and many college football programs operate as large corporations with the head coach acting as a member of top management—similar to the COO—of the football program. Using data from 2006-2012, we examine the causal relationship between a head coach’s school pay, past performance, and football program size. Our results indicate the most important determinant of a head coach’s pay is the total revenue generated by the football program.