Penn State goes all in on Football, James Franklin with mega-extension
3. Assistant Coaches Pool Money
If you look around college football you will see that not only do the most elite programs pay their head coaches extremely well, they pay their assistant coaches well also.
Now Baylor head coach Dave Aranda, was making over seven figures as the defensive coordinator at LSU in 2019 when they went undefeated and won the national championship. Clemson, who captured national titles in 2016 and 2018 and reached the final in 2015 and 2019, has the highest paid coordinator in college football in Brent Venables, the teams defensive coordinator.
In 2021 Venables signed a five year contract extension that will pay him $2.5 million a year over that span. In 2020, Alabama was paying then offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian $2.5 million a year as well to keep him from taking head coaching jobs. Texas eventually came calling and he made the move, however he led the Crimson Tide and their historically good offense to national title in 2020 before leaving town.
Starting to notice a trend here?
Franklin’s contract extension will allow him extra spending money when it comes to assistant coaches and coordinators. That allows you not only to go out and attain play callers like Mike Yurcich, but to keep them around once they are here.
Penn State Football has not disclosed Yurcich’s salary, however he was making $1.7 million at Texas as the offensive coordinator before Franklin was able to land him in the blue and white.
The head coach has made a lot of assistant coaching changes in the last couple of years, and most have them have worked out very well. However, he has lost a few guys he was unable to retain in the likes of Tim Banks to Tennessee and Tyler Bowen who was the tight ends coach to the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Sometimes these analysts and position coaches are super important to recruiting and player development as we saw Bowen recruit and develop guys like Pat Freiermuth and Mike Gisecki who are now playing on Sundays.
Making sure Penn State Football has access to the most high profile assistant coaches and can retain the ones they do have is the next step in the Nittany Lions competing at the most elite levels of the sports.