I saw on the “Coogs House” FB group where someone posted that the Aggies pulled in a bunch of great #1 state recruits. I’ll admit, the list is impressive.
Of course, the Coog comments were the standard and unoriginal, “… and they’ll go 7-5”… “Nobody does less with more”. There was one funny comment saying something like “Great sneak peek at our future transfers.”
So - as a pure academic exercise, I took the coach salary of each school to determine cost per win. I know there are other program costs, but I’m just calcing head coach salary for the moment - mostly because it’s an easy number to find and I don’t care enough to know how much each program is making and spending on football as a whole.
Jimbo makes $7.5 mil / year and has won 17 games in 2 years.
Dana made $3.4 mil in 2019 and won 4 games. Incidentally, Dana makes $3.5 million in 2020 and $3.7 million in 2021. He gets more expensive the longer we keep him.
That nets to:
Aggies coach $ / win = $882,353 per win
Coogs coach $ / win = $850,000 per win
Indeed, the Aggies paid more for for their wins, and technically did ‘less with more’, but we Coogs aren’t far behind.
And those that know me know I’m not a Dana hater. Just thought it was a fun exercise and a bit surprised with results. Figured I’d share and good convo starter.
Aggies get $300 million from PUF and $40 million for being a member of the SEC. They can afford it. We can’t. We get zero ($0.00) from PUF and $7 million for being an AAC member. We’re drowning in the red and if we don’t get into a Power conference soon the program is not sustainable. We have to have faith in our Admin to do the things it will take to join a money conference. I think hiring CDH is one of the boxes to check.
The more I think about it, cost per win isn’t a good metric.
If we paid some coach $20 million /year and he wins the National Championship, we probably would spend over $1.5 mil per win and that’s totally worth it.
Maybe a better question is… What did other programs pay for a 4 win season?
If Dana continues to cost $850K/win, he won’t last. Same goes for Jimbo. The difference between us an Aggie is we don’t have a history of getting less for more.
Come back next year after Dana wins 9 or 10 games and then a bowl game and tell us how much a win was worth then!! Aggie has underachieved for 80 years!! They even managed to underachieve when they had a Heisman winner and Bear Bryant was their coach!! (in 1957) They went from number 1, to losing to Rice and a 3 game losing streak…
Thats who they are…Its who theyll ALWAYS be…
Happily, it is NOT who we are…
If you’re going to try to play this game, you need to include all costs - facilities, assistant coaches, support staff, AD’s office, advertising, recruiting budget, program expenses, etc. it’s still not a great comparison because some of those costs are incurred to generate revenue more than wins, though they’re certainly linked.
And the AD is ultimately accountable for the coach’s success. Why not compare on that basis?
