Special Report

Championships are nice, but it’s that winning personality that earns most college coaches their big money.

For 10 of the Southeastern Conference’s 12 football coaches, a coach’s base salary averaged 18 percent of his overall 2006 compensation. The other public school in the SEC, the University of Mississippi, merely reports a flat fee for its coach, and Vanderbilt University, the 12th school in the conference, is private.

Of the 10 coaches with specific and detailed contracts, the bulk of their income comes from agreements to participate in weekly television and radio shows.

For instance, Mike Shula’s 2006 contract with Alabama provided him a $200,000 base salary. The university paid him another $1.35 million “talent fee,” for his weekly coach’s shows and other endorsements.

Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops, the highest-paid football coach in the country until Alabama hired Nick Saban, received $1.7 million last year for his endorsements and other public relations activities on behalf of the athletics department.

Reading the fine print

Contracts do include hefty incentives for success. Winning the BCS National Championship earned Florida’s Urban Meyer an additional $250,000. Other postseason rewards ranged from $100,000 for Les Miles at Louisiana State University thanks to a BCS bowl appearance to $15,000 for the University of Kentucky’s Rich Brooks after his non-BCS bowl bid.

Coaches get big paychecks from the shoe and athletic apparel companies their schools sign with, upward of

$530,000 from a deal with Nike for the University of Georgia’s Mark Richt.

Alabama, Florida, Kentucky and South Carolina also offered their coaches memberships to local country clubs.

Of the 10 contracts provided, five — the universities of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana State and Mississippi State — offered coaches a bonus for meeting academic standards.

Brooks signed a contract extension this month that will add an academic performance incentive and increase his total package to $1 million per year, leaving Mississippi’s Ed Orgeron, Mississippi State’s Sylvester Croom and Vanderbilt University’s Bobby Johnson as the SEC’s only sub-million earners.

Though specifics on Johnson’s contract weren’t available, the university’s public IRS 990 form for fiscal 2005 showed he earned $835,300 that year.

That was less than three professors, including Joseph A. Smith, chair of urologic surgery at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, who earned $1.15 million.

Want to know what a coach makes?

USAToday.com has a database with almost every major college coach’s contract on file.