Bloomberg News published a story featuring the salaries of the atheltic directors for nearly all the major NCAA schools in Division I-Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), with Jeremy Foley of the University of Florida ranked as the highest-paid athletic director. According to contracts obtained by Blooomberg through open-records requests, Foley earns a guaranteed salary of $965,000, and more than $1 million after benefits and bonuses. The University of Kansas’s Lew Perkins is second at $900,000, followed by the University of Wisconsin’s Barry Alvarez at $750,000. The average base salary for an athletic director in NCAA Division I-FBS is $324,779.
“The athletic director is more like a CEO of a corporation than a guy who hires coaches,” said University of Florida President Bernard Machen, who will earn $416,000 in base pay this year. “Jeremy oversees everything from the sale of bonds for capital construction to tickets and sponsorships, and he manages more than 500 employees.” Florida plays the University of Oklahoma in the Bowl Championship Title football game on Thursday.
The Florida athletic director, who didn’t respond to an interview request, has managed $199 million in renovations to sports facilities during his tenure and oversees an $83 million budget. Joe Castiglione, Foley’s counterpart at Oklahoma, makes a base salary of $700,000, fourth in the NCAA. The contracts were acquired by filing public records requests with each public university in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision. In some cases, salaries were obtained from state salary databases. Schools that aren’t required by law to disclose employee contracts, such as the University of Southern California, the University of Notre Dame and University of Miami, aren’t included.
“Athletic directors are no more important than faculty in any discipline, but they are paid proportionally more because salaries at a university reflect the outside marketplace, and American society clearly places a high value on collegiate and professional sports,” said University of Kansas Chancellor
Robert Hemenway, who announced his retirement last month.
For the complete article and listing of contracts, link here.