Can Eric Barron find a bargain athletic director at Penn State?

Everyone by now is plenty familiar with the absurd rise in college football and men's basketball coaching pay over the last 30 or so years. Right now the highest-paid coach, Nick Saban, makes nearly $7 million, and the salaries keep going up. The average current football coach is making about 43 percent more than his predecessor and 143 percent more than the coach who preceded his predecessor. That's a sizable increase.

Athletic directors at major universities, however, have seen their salaries jump too. At top athletic schools, they're often making as much or more than the university president.     

And as Penn State looks for a new athletic director to replace Dave Joyner, it will probably need to spend more money than it has been spending. Dave Joyner's $396,000 salary was nothing compared to what other schools were spending.

I took this data from USA Today's 2013 athletic director salary base (its most recent), and isolated the universities who are members of the Big Five conferences in football (plus Notre Dame). The average athletic director salary is $707,418 and the median athletic director salary is $600,500. Scroll way down to the bottom to see where Joyner ranks.

*From USA Today

Of course, look a couple spots below Penn State and you'll see Penn State President Eric Barron's former school. For most of Barron's tenure at Florida State, he was paying relative peanuts to his athletic director, Randy Spetman. Barron got rid of Spetman last year, replacing him with Stan Wilcox, and Wilcox is still a bargain. His salary is $485,000 annually, putting him well below the average and the median. 

Wilcox was not a big name. He was an assistant athletic director at Duke. That's why Florida State didn't have to pay him a salary that is near seven figures. 

Will Barron try to replicate that at Penn State, where the school is paying $4 million a year for James Franklin, putting him among the 10 highest-paid coaches in the country.

This got me thinking: Do top football schools with high-paid, big-name coaches have athletic directors who are lesser paid? I compiled data regarding coaches' salaries from last year, again using USA Today's database. This data has the coaches from the 2012 football season, given that A.D. salaries from above are from the 2012-13 year.  

Here's a table listing athletic directors, their salaries and their ranking amongst their peers with the same information for those schools' coaches. 

*From USA Today

Here's what the data looks like on a scatterplot chart.

If you look at the first 20 points on the X-axis, the schools with the top 20 highest-paid football coaches, you'll see that only eight of those schools have athletic directors ranked among the top 20-highest paid. Of the schools that have mid-level paid coaches, 20-40, only eight of those have athletic directors who are also ranked among 20-40.* And of the schools with the lowest paid coaches 40-62 only seven of those schools have athletic directors with salaries ranking from 40-62. If we consider only the schools with the 20 highest paid coaches and the 22 lowest paid coaches, nearly two-thirds of them (27 out of 42) have an athletic director in a different third of salary ranking. That is, schools with expensive coaches are more likely to have medium or lower compensated athletic director and a school with an inexpensive football coach is more likely to have a medium or higher compensated athletic director. 

What about the super-rich? Do the top 10 highest-grossing college football programs buck the trend and pay a ton for their football coach and their athletic director? I'm working on another project with these types of numbers and actually can list the top 10 highest-grossing football programs of the last nine years, using data from the Dept. of Education. Those programs are Texas, Georgia, Michigan, Florida, Notre Dame, Alabama, LSU, Penn State, Auburn and Ohio State.

Here's how their coach, athletic director rankings look.

Four out of 10 have coaches and athletic directors both among the 20 highest-paid in the country and six of them do not. So they don't vary much from the rest of the schools from the Big Five conferences.

All of this is not enough to say there's a direct correlation between the amount a school will pay for a football coach and the amount a school will pay for an athletic director. If so, those data points would be clustered in downward line from left to right. But it is more likely that a school that spends a ton on its football coach compared to other schools is going to spend less on its athletic director, compared to other schools.