I don't disagree that that's ridiculous, as is 10 mil + for Saban. You're basically paying demand pricing, and it's ugly and brutal. If you offered 200k to a football coach you'd probably be laughed out of the room.

By comparison, at Purdue Mike Bobinsky makes ~750k. Morgan Burke made 500k. I don't know what a "reasonable" AD salary should be, but this seems closer to it.

If we're doing profit sharing, what's left after the facilities, the equipment, the scheduling, the logistics, and all the other outlay to get the sport going?

Let's say my company is young and still barely breaking even as it struggles to grow. Do I make $0? What about the 200+ football programs that lose money?

1. As has been repeatedly discussed back here, Swarbrick made $3M in one specific year (FY16) in which he received a $1.8M bonus. His typical total annual compensation (which includes base, incentive, deferred, etc.) is more like $1.7M to $1.9M.

2. Mike Bobinski does not make around $750K. That was his starting base salary when he got an extension almost 5 years ago. That extension also included various forms of deferred and incentive compensation. His total compensation is comfortably north of $1M a year.

All of this information is readily available. But even without digging into the numbers, people need to exercise a little more common sense about this stuff. I get that Notre Dame is poorly run. It is not, however, "we pay Jack Swarbrick two times the going rate for top ADs and 4 times the rate of Purdue ADs" poorly run.

Below someone suggested that Tim Murphy gets paid $75K (based on an article that he didn't realize was from 1993). People need to exercise the smell test with some of this stuff.

I'd love to excuse myself by saying it was a quick google, but that doesn't mean I need to stop there. Also to be fair, jacks salary showed up on multiple Google searches as that, so it'd be easy to be mislead. I was far more confident in Morgan Burke as we lived in the same neighborhood.

Honestly, I think I was also blinded by the fact that there is so much disparity in college coaching salaries. "Why not ADs as well?" my naive self thought. Whoops!

I'd go back to a basic issue I have with a lot of these discussions. What IS an appropriate salary for a good AD? What IS an appropriate salary for a good football coach?

The demand economy dictates what it is under the current system, though we would rather it not be so. I don't think we can change that without essentially making the demand nonexistent.

I'm mostly just firmly against sudden massive revenue sharing in a single sport just because it has more eyeballs than another sport in which athletes have the same level of effort.

If people want that, fine - go make it a semi-pro travel team, then it's a fundamentally different league.

None of this is to suggest the current system is great or ok, as is inevitably a counter-argument that seems to fly in. Just because one doesn't support the specific change mechanism doesn't mean I support the status quo either.