How Underwood’s Salary Desires Compare to Big 12 Coaches and their Achievements

It’s been an interesting couple of days to say the least. Many fans, like myself, woke up Friday morning more excited to watch the NCAA tournament than any day for the last 8 years.

Three days later, not only were we eliminated from the tournament, but we lost our coach, and possibly Jawun Evans. There have been terrific articles articulating what this means for the last several days on this site. The question for me now is, did Underwood deserve the salary he wanted from Holder? In the famous words of ancient Latin writer Publius Syrus,

“Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it”.

These words apply still thousands of years later, even to athletic departments. In this case, Illinois was willing to pay Underwood $3 million over 6 years, putting him in the ranks of Greg Marshall, Kevin Ollie and Lon Kruger in terms of compensation.

Peering through Holder’s eyes, it’s easy to see how he balked at Underwood’s request. Here’s the list of Big 12 coaching salaries and their collegiate accomplishments.

Based on this, Underwood was asking/received Scott Drew money. The Big 12 league average for coaches salary is a bit inflated, but four out of 10 coaches have been to a Final Four and every coach has made an NCAA Tournament.

Remember Underwood allegedly asked for $2.9 or $3 million from OSU and then received $2.75 million in Year 1 from Illinois.

Logistically, it’s very difficult to comprehend handing out a contract of that size to Underwood. I do see the power in potential and acknowledge the continuing upward trend Underwood is on.

Nonetheless, compared to the salary of other coaches in the league, Underwood simply has not achieved close to what some of these other coaches have.

Holder has been often criticized, but in this situation, I completely understand not willing to hand out $3 million to a coach who hasn’t made it to a Sweet 16, hasn’t had a top-25 recruiting class, or even finished in the top five of a Power 5 league once in his career.

Ultimately Holder didn’t see the accomplishments translate into that hefty of a pay raise. But I think that’s where we are nowadays. We live in an instant gratification culture (to borrow a phrase from Mike Gundy).

One in which people will commit to an entity or situation as long as it meets all of their needs in their timing. As soon as it doesn’t, we tend to jump ship to the next thing that will satisfy our next needs. Illinois met that next instant gratification and now OSU searches for the next coach who will see fulfillment in Stillwater.