Coming off back-to-back 12-win seasons, most head football coaches would be in line for a sizable bump in pay.
When it comes to Urban Meyer, however, that’s not the case. Well, at least for the immediate future it’s not.
In an interview with Jeremy Fowler of CBSSports.com, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith revealed that, at the moment, there are no plans to make any type of “adjustments” to Meyer’s current deal. Smith stated Meyer is already a well-compensated coach, and strongly intimated that the Buckeyes will need to win a title -- Big Ten or College Football Playoff, presumably -- before any contractual enhancements are consummated.
“We started out with a good contract. The timing was right,” Smith told Fowler. “The dollars will eventually change at some point because the market’s changing, Nick Saban and all that. Urban’s still in the top 10. He’s probably in the top 8, he came in at top 5, he’s probably slidden, he might be in the top 8 now.
“There will be a time, probably when he wins a championship, or there’s some elite performance of that nature where we need to look at the market again. ... There will be a window, I don’t know when. It will happen.”
Despite no pay raise on the horizon, you won’t have to worry about the Meyer household being forced to replace Oreos with Hydrox at any point in the near future. USA Today pegged Meyer’s total pay for the 2013 season at $4.608 million. That total was tops in the Big Ten -- Michigan’s Brady Hoke was next at $4.154 million -- while it was sixth nationally behind Alabama’s Nick Saban ($5.396 million), Texas’ Mack Brown ($5.393 million), Arkansas’ Bret Bielema ($5.195 million), Tennessee’s Butch Jones ($4.86 million) and Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops ($4.773 million).
Even as Brown “stepped down” at UT, Meyer would still fall just outside of last year’s Top Five as Brown’s replacement, Charlie Strong, signed a five-year contract that will pay him $5 million the first year.
Upon his hiring as the permanent replacement for Jim Tressel in November of 2011, Meyer was the third-highest paid head coach in the country, behind only Saban and Brown. Meyer’s current contract runs through the 2017 season.