Too Much?? Not Enough?? Who Knows??

The salaries of athletes and coaches is long going to be debated.

Sometimes it is fun, maybe even sad, to look at the salaries of college basketball coaches. Are they too high? Oh yes compared to the average worker. Are some coaches for what they accomplish, underpaid? Oh yes.

The highest paid coach in country at present is Rick Pitino. He makes 7.5 million per year. Louisville, so far you are not getting your money's WORTH.

There is no question that the two best basketball leagues over time have been the Big East and ACC. As you might imagine, the highest paid coach in the ACC is Coach K. at Duke, coming in at 4.1 million per year and Jim Calhoun tops the Big East coaches at 2.3 million.

Moving westward, Thad Matta tops the Big Ten at 2.4 million, while Bill Self as you might expect is the highest paid coach in the Big 12 at 3 million per year.

When you get to the West Coast things really get interesting. The soon to be Pac-12 is lead by Sean Miller at 2.3 million, Ben Howland makes 1.5 million and the three lowest paid coaches in the Pac-12 are Craig Robison, Oregon State and Ken Bone, Washington State, both at $750,000, with Tad Boyle at Colorado  bringing up the rear at $590,000.

For sure all americans could live on those kind of wages for quite sometime.

In comparison, there is REALITY and there also are some people who should be getting more by today's standards.

Wayne Hinkle one of the best coaches on the west coast at Montana, HE makes $160,000, that is half of what the average coach in the Western Athletic Conference makes. There is always talk of Montana moving to the WAC.  Tyler Geving who has done a really nice job at Portland State, considering the mess Ken Bone left the program in,  makes $117,000.

Randy Bennett at St. Mary's and Eric Reveno at U of Portland are both terribly underrated coaches and being at private schools it is tough to get accurate numbers on their salaries, but it is more than common knowledge both of these rising stars in the coaching ranks, with just one move upward,  would more than double their present salaries.

In conclusion, the average head coaching salary of the 68 teams that made the NCAA men's basketball tournament in 2011 was 1.4 million.

Coaches out west need to catch up, some coaches are tremendously overpaid and you be the judge on whether all of this is FAIR?

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