Steve Sarkisian’s very good year just got better.
But so did Texas’.
The Longhorns’ third-year head football coach, who took them to a 12-2 record and their first appearance in the College Football Playoff last season, will almost double his salary and make $10.3 million next season with annual incremental raises of $100,000 through 2030. The salary bump will pay him at least $74.2 million over the course of the next seven seasons, not including bonuses that could top out at $1.85 million.
This expected news on top of the January announcement of a four-year extension reveals why Sarkisian never seriously considered himself a candidate for the briefly vacant Alabama head coaching job, which went to Washington’s Kalen DeBoer.
He’s home.
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Alabama clearly held Sarkisian in the highest regard and, if he had been interested, probably would have hired him over DeBoer. Given several strong public endorsements from Nick Saban and the fact that Sarkisian’s Longhorns whipped the Crimson Tide by 10 points in Tuscaloosa last September, he was probably at the top of Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne’s list of replacements.
“I’d say that’s accurate,” one college football insider said about Sarkisian’s appeal to Alabama.
But he was always staying put.
He knew he could make similar money in Austin, but moreover he is unabashedly ambitious and hungry to stamp his own imprint on Texas’ storied football program, which has four national championships.
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Chasing DKR: every football coach’s dream at Texas
Sarkisian, those closest to him say, is driven to create his own legacy at a program where the gold standard was set by Darrell Royal with his three national championships and 11 Southwest Conference titles in 20 years. When Royal retired at the early age of 52, he had a remarkable 167-47 record, had never suffered a single losing season and was credited (alongside the undervalued Emory Bellard) with inventing the revolutionary wishbone offense and a full-time academic adviser. That’s the target.
Sarkisian, 49, isn’t likely to supplant DKR in Longhorns history. But he has a chance to chase and perhaps leapfrog Mack Brown, who won only one national title and two Big 12 crowns here with 158 victories.
Also, Sark and his wife preferred to live in this city and not Tuscaloosa.
Plus, who in his right mind really wants to follow Saban and his seven national titles?
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Pay bump will put Sarkisian in select company
The huge increase will make Sarkisian the third-highest-paid FBS head football coach among all 134 coaches just one month after ranking a lowly 30th on that list at $5.6 million. Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte and the UT System Board of Regents have made it clear they want to keep all their head coaches among the five highest-paid in the country in their sports.
Sarkisian’s hefty salary ranks behind only Clemson’s Dabo Swinney ($10.85 million) and Georgia’s Kirby Smart ($10.7 million). Those two have combined for four national titles. With the retirement of Saban and the departure of Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh to the Los Angeles Chargers, Smart, Swinney and Brown, now at North Carolina, are the only three active college coaches with national titles on their résumés.
The numbers for DeBoer have not yet been released, but Saban was the king of all college football with a salary of $11.407 million.
On Saturday, Del Conte preferred not to discuss the raise in depth.
“Pending Board of Regents approval, we are very excited about this opportunity for Steve and the University of Texas,” Del Conte told the American-Statesman. “When everybody is rowing the boat in the same direction, it’s a real magical time.”
Del Conte said he would not discuss any of the details surrounding Sarkisian’s new contract until after the regents formally approve it during their meetings Wednesday and Thursday. The news of Sarksian’s contract figures broke when the regents released them in their public agenda.
Texas puts its money where its mouth is
His updated salary is a far cry from his previous paycheck, which ranked only fourth in the Big 12 behind Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy, Oklahoma’s Brent Venables and Kansas’ Lance Leipold and would have trailed all but two head coaches in the SEC.
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Too risky?
Not at all, since recent history has said loud and clear that Texas can’t afford to fail again because it and Oklahoma will join the barbed-wire SEC on July 1. Suppose Sarkisian had been motivated to pursue the Alabama job. Whom would Texas have gone after? There would have been a shallow pool of proven candidates.
Yes, Texas can afford Sarkisian’s price tag as a school with the second-highest endowment, behind only Harvard, at more than $42 billion. But some might say it is a gamble since Sarkisian has had only one spectacular year after his first two seasons in Austin produced only a 13-12 record and an Alamo Bowl loss.
When he was picked by Board of Regents Chairman Kevin Eltife and Del Conte, Sarkisian was hardly considered a slam-dunk hire. He was coming off two seasons as Saban’s offensive coordinator and had posted a mediocre 46-35 record in seven years at Washington and USC. However, those who focus on such shortcomings discount the facts that he followed Ty Willingham’s disastrous reign and 0-12 finale at Washington by winning five, seven, seven, seven and nine games, and he kept USC afloat for two winning seasons after NCAA penalties under others’ watch had docked the Trojans 30 scholarships over three years.
Very few critics would say he doesn’t deserve it, I guess. That’s because before last season, Texas had grown exhausted while wandering in the college football wilderness since its last Big 12 title — and national championship game appearance — in 2009. That’s an epic drought for this proud program.
The school went through three head coaches, including Brown with his staggering success for the first dozen seasons before a huge drop-off the last six seasons when he couldn’t duplicate the golden years of the first decade of the 2000s. And it was looking for hope.
Texas found it and struck gold with its relatively new coach. And now so has Sarkisian.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas football coach Steve Sarkisian’s pay raise puts him near the top
