How much does Nebraska spend on coaches?

The Omaha World-Hearld posted Nebraska's 2012 coaching salaries on Friday. The brief rundown is this: John Papuchis gets a 50 percent raise to $300,000 for his promotion. Almost every other coach gets a $20,000 raise except for Ross Els, who gets a $50,000 bump in pay, and Corey Raymond, who gets no raise. Make of that what you will but Raymond was already at $200,000, the highest salary of last year's new-hires and equal to what Papuchis was making as the DL/ST coach.

Bo Pelini will also get a $100,000 raise to $2.875 million. All told, Nebraska will spend $4.975 million on its coaching staff next year, up from $4.905 million in 2011. Seems like a big number and it is. Nebraska spent the third-highest amount on football coaching salaries in the Big Ten last year according to USA Today. But that number doesn't really mean much on its own given the wide gaps in football revenue across the Big Ten.

What is interesting is the percentage of Nebraska's football money the school is spending on football coaches.

The numbers in the following chart are taken from USA Today's 2011 coaching salary database. You can read the full methodology behind those numbers here, but the chart below is (an admittedly simple) calculation of total coaching salaries as a percentage of reported football-only net profit from 2011.

Big Ten Coaching Salaries v. FB Income

SCHOOL	ALL COACHES	FB INCOME	PCT
Purdue	$2,423,406	$6,297,633	38.48
Indiana	$3,210,000	$8,989,433	35.71
Illinois	$3,932,500	$13,671,285	28.76
Wisconsin	$4,532,036	$16,621,483	27.27
Minnesota	$3,415,000	$14,888,991	22.94
Iowa	$5,783,000	$28,005,330	20.65
Ohio State	$3,725,550	$18,154,877	20.52
Nebraska	$4,905,000	$32,084,379	15.29
Michigan St	$3,597,050	$24,263,640	14.82
Michigan	$5,814,000	$44,861,184	12.96
Penn State	$1,022,794	$49,217,078	2.08
Northwestern	$1,189,961	NA	NA

A couple of notes:

--USA Today used the income numbers reported to the NCAA but this isn't necessarily a uniform number, particularly when it comes to shoe company money. Ohio State's income seems low but that could be due to how they allocated their school-wide Nike deal. The Buckeyes' also had a relative bargain this year in interim coach Luke Fickell.

--Penn State's numbers are a little shaky as well, due in part to Pennsylvania's strange public records laws that offer some protection to public institutions and also in part to Joe Paterno's senior discount salary. Unrelated to that: Holy (blank)! $49 million!

--Northwestern isn't required to disclose but I think it's safe to assume the Wildcats would rank in the top half of this list.

A couple of thoughts:

--To be honest, I thought Nebraska would rank lower than it did but at 15.29 percent (8th out of 11 teams) but Nebraska is in line with most of its perceived "contemporaries" (i.e. Michigan, Ohio State, Iowa, Michigan State).

--What this calculation really illuminates for me:

1) Schools that aren't traditional football powers are in a losing battle with ever escalating coaching salaries. According to USA Today, college coaching salaries have risen 55 percent over the last six seasons. For schools like Purdue and Indiana the simple "cost of doing business" resulted in them spending more than 30 percent of their football income last year on staff alone. The idea of devoting major resources to football and hiring a big name coach is almost impossible to do at those schools without running at a defecit. And that's in the Big Ten, a conference with a wide, devoted and monied alumni base. To put it another way, Ohio State will pay Urban Meyer, and just Urban Meyer, $4 million next year. That was 63.5 percent of Purdue's total football income last year.

2) Widening the scope, Nebraska is well-placed among its national contemporaries as well. Nebraska's total 2011 coaching salary ($4.905M) ranked 16th nationally in 2011. The net profit of the football program ($32.1M) ranked 12th while the net profit for the athletic department as a whole ($1.75M) ranked 17th. Could they go higher? Sure. Alabama spent 20.8 percent of its football income ($40.77M) last year on coaches, but Nebraska is far from lagging behind.

Individually, Pelini's $2.775 million per year ranked 13th nationally last season and you'll hear both sides of the argument from Nebraska fans -- for some it's too high, for other it's not high enough when you consider the arms race going on at places like Texas, Alabama and Ohio State. But when factoring in football income, Nebraska is pretty competitive and you also have to consider this: Pelini's maximum bonus potential of $1 million based on contract incentives (12th nationally) seemed like a fair number as well. Only four coaches -- Kirk Ferentz, Gene Chizik, Chip Kelly and Steve Spurrier -- had a higher base salary and a max bonus of $1 million or more.

So, how much does Nebraska spend on its football coaches? The raw number doesn't really matter but in comparison to the rest of the schools and coaches in FBS I think you can definitively say this: It's a very fair amount.