Why The Michigan State Football Coach Earns More Than The Top Ten Highest-Paid Employees

An article was published the other day in the Lansing State Journal titled “MSU's top 10 highest-paid employees”.  The very first sentence in that article stated:

“Michigan State University's football coach earns more than the school's top 10 highest-paid employees outside the athletics department — combined.”

They then listed how much the top ten employees at Michigan State University, excluding athletics, make and do not put the football and basketball head coaches salaries in perspective.  The list is as follows:

1. President Samuel Stanley Jr.: $720,000
2. Executive Vice President for Health Sciences Norman Beauchamp Jr.: $588,800
3. Chief Investment Officer Philip Zecher: $506,000
4. Assistant Vice President for Health Sciences and Chief Clinical and Medical Officer Anthony Avellino: $504,666
5. Provost Teresa Woodruff: $473,800
6. College of Business Dean Sanjay Gupta: $472,236
7. Office of Health Sciences Chief Business Officer Norman Edward Hubbard: $462,500
8. Chairperson of the Department of Family Medicine in the College of Human Medicine Bengt Birger Arnetz: $404,820
9. College of Human Medicine Dean Aron Sousa: $390,600
10. 10.College of Osteopathic Medicine Dean Andrea Amalfitano: $383,160

Those top ten salaries total a little more than 4,900,000.  MSU’s basketball coach, Tom Izzo, earned approximately $3.9 million and their football coach, Mel Tucker, earned approximately $5 million dollars.

According to a site called bestcolleges.com during the 2018-19 college athletic season, the MSU teams brought into the university $140,010,865.  Almost all of that money came from the football and basketball programs.

The latest numbers I could find goes back to the 2016 football program which brought in approximately $65 million according to the Detroit Free Press.

The following charts from collegefactual.com show that only the football and basketball programs run a profit.  All other sports lose money for the school.

What the Lansing State Journal does not inform their readers is just how much the football and basketball programs being.  That is why the football and basketball coaches make the money they do make.