How formally paying athletes as employees could impact coaching salaries, staff sizes

If college football goes the way of paying athletes as employees it could impact the salaries of coaches and staff sizes.

On3’s Andy Staples broke it down on Thursday’s show, considering how coaches at the highest levels might not be affected. However, anybody below that, then those staffs could be drastically different.

What do you care about more? The payment of the coaches or the payments to get better players?

“And I do not think the best coaches will make less money,” Staples said. “Kirby Smart just signed a new deal … (He) is probably worth more than $13 million a year. He is the best coach in college football … What I’m curious about is, will the replacement level coaches still get these massive deals?

“Well, the guys who win seven or eight games a year at a place where the average coach wins seven or eight games a year, will schools bump them to $7 million or $8 million a year or will they say you know what? We can just put this money into buying better players and get another version of you for half the price. Because I think that’s, if you’re thinking about it realistically, what you could do.”

At that point, as Staples pointed out, do you want to pay athletes more money to get the better players or pay a coach a higher salary?

“Do you have a coach who went seven or eight games a year and his agent comes in demanding seven and a half million dollars? It’s just like, No, we’ll take this guy for three and a half,” Staples said. “And we’ll put that three and a half towards getting a quarterback … There’s not a salary cap unless they can collectively bargain. There’s going to be a salary floor where they say we’re going to commit this much to paying players. But unless they can collectively bargain, there’s not going to be a salary cap. So you’re going to try to figure out how to use that money as best you can.” 

Paying athletes could impact coaches

The staff size is the caveat to all of this. As Staples argued, you might not necessarily need myriad assistant coaches as it is now.

“It’s the staff size and the amount of people that you’re paying, it’s not just what you pay the head coach, it’s what you pay in general,” Staples said. “And so one of the things I’ve said about the Florida situation, as these years have gone by under Billy Napier, is that when they hired Billy Napier, NIL was five and a half months old. Nobody knew exactly how it was going to evolve. But imagine if you went back to the people at Florida with a map of how it was going to evolve. And you said okay, ‘Billy Napier’s coming in here and he wants to expand the staff by a lot, by dozens of people. that you’re going to have to now pay and that’s going to cost millions of dollars.’ 

“Would you prefer doing that or using those millions of dollars to buy better players? The answer from anybody who knows how things have evolved would be: you definitely use that to buy better players like. Had they said, donors who were begging for money right now to pay for all these new staff members. Had they said, we would like you to donate to the collective so that we can now pay  players more or get different players or get more good players, had you said that, they would have a better team. But nobody knew how things were going to evolve.” 

As it relates to Florida or any other big named institution, the changes could come sooner rather than later. Of course, it all depends on if these student-athletes will be actual paid employees.

“So going forward, do you need all those polo shirts? No, you absolutely do not.” Staples said. “You still need important people, like you need really good position coaches, but not necessarily really good position coaches who are great recruiters. Like a lot of times a good position coach who was a great recruiter was code for bagman, or at least bagman adjacent. You don’t have to worry about that anymore. That’s not part of the skill set you care about.”