200-300k is 10% of our operating budget. If we have people in charge that are dumb enough to think that doesn't matter to a business, then maybe it's best they follow your lead and rollover and die because some other people have more money to spend.
I think basketball bobcatattackers are having the wrong conversation. It matters because your 10% figure is too high. $200-$300K should be far less than 10% of the operating budget. The operating budget is falling behind. If Ohio wants to win the coach should be paid what Boals is getting paid. If Ohio wants to win the NIL budget needs to increase. MAC teams need to keep up with the Miami. Most on here think Akron has $1 million every year for NIL. Unless we are spending more for basketball we are in for some long years as OU basketball fans.
(Or, maybe I'm wrong and the university is coming up with more funds as SBH posted he's heard. Would be nice to know.)
This is a false premise. My suggesting we be smarter about spending the money we have doesn't mean that we shouldn't also increase revenue. I get it -- you want us to have more money than we do. Id like that, too. In the meantime though, let's manage the budget we have like adults and not run a small "company" that operates at a loss in a way that pays the CEO 25% of the operating budget.
Were this a business, no board in the world would approve a CEO pay package that high for a company this small.
This is a very valid train of thought, no logical or sound business would allocate that amount of funds to their CEO if operating at a loss. My counter to the argument is that college athletics is a fantasy land business model and is very far from an efficient business.
The core objective of the Ohio athletics department is to be competitive within the conference and win MAC championships. The other objective is to serve as the "front porch" of the university, and attract students and in a lot of ways serve as an advertising budget for the university. MAC athletic departments according to the financials all technically run at around even, but the books count millions of dollars in institutional subsidies and in some cases student fees as "revenue". Whether true or not, MAC schools view this operating loss as a necessity to keep the university known and continue to attract students. There is real data to support this. Loyola and George Mason both saw massive spikes in applications following deep tournament runs, but for the majority the math isn't so easy. Even Miami this year likely saw an uptick in admissions applications along with massive revenue spikes from basketball because of their success.
So why can't we pay a coach $300K and allocate the savings to the player budget? Because a coach in college basketball is the single most important entity in a program year in and year out. A bad coach can sink a program completely (even faster than a bad CEO) and a good coach can elevate a program and outperform the resources they are given (again, faster than a good CEO). To get a good coach, you have to pay a competitive rate. Given the recent Miami fan thread, why would a power school assistant leave a $750K salary for a $300K head coaching role when they might have opportunities at other schools for more money and overall team funding. If you are paying below market rate, you are going to get a below market result.
In a traditional business, paying 25% of the operating budget to one employee is insane, but the business model of college athletics is insane. To remain competitive in the landscape, you can't punt on the most important person in the program. You can't spend 10% of the operating budget on a coach when every peer institution in the conference is at 25%+ and expect to get a quality coach and then be competitive year in and year out. If anything, the portal era makes the job of coaches harder, as they now have to rebuild the roster every single year, and the response to this by a lot of programs has been to adjust their coaching staffs to replace a traditional coaching slot with a GM.
Ultimately, to circle back to your original point: your logic is perfectly sound for a normal company. But the reality of the college athletics model is that if your objective is to stay competitive in the conference, you simply have to keep up with the market spending. The moment you stray from that and try to run the athletic department like a rational, traditional business, you quickly fall behind your peers. It makes total sense in the corporate world, but college athletics just isn't that.
Do you have numbers supporting that everybody in the conference pays 25% of operating budget on their coach? I haven't dug deep on basketball budgets in the test of the conference, but if you consider that Boals it's one of the 2 or 3 highest paid coaches in the league, I have trouble seeing how he's not at least a bit of an outlier. What market are we keeping up with? The MAC? Mid major schools that also have D1 football? Do we have to keep up with folks who fund via private donations we can't match?
I get the broader point, but don't actually find it particularly compelling. Especially in an era of revenue share. It seems completely nonsensical to me that the introduction of revenue share and suddenly having a massive new cost -- the players themselves -- has no bearing on how we allocate money going forward. Barring the top line revenue allocation increasing by ~25%, I just can't see how the money works otherwise.
In terms of the "front porch" theory -- Boals is 8 years in. Surely there's a way to measure the investment, right? Is paying $700k for a basketball coach paying off?
Too much of this basically seems to boil down to people insisting we have to pay a basketball coach $700k because we previously decided to pay a basketball coach $700k. I don't understand how we measure the success of doing so, and I don't understand why we watch schools in our conference pay coaches less and then beat up on us and decide that's okay.
Fair pushback on the 25% figure. That number was already floating around in the thread and I assumed if it were true, other MAC schools were probably in a similar range. Pulling the actual data tells an interesting story that largely supports the broader point regardless.
Using FY25 operating budgets via Extra Points' MFRS data and publicly reported coaching compensation, here's where every MAC program actually sits:
1. UMass - 29.0% ($1,830,000 / $6,314,236)
2. Kent State - 23.7% ($675,000 / $2,843,843)
3. Akron - 20.9% ($850,000 / $4,065,757)
4. Toledo - 18.5% ($586,000 / $3,167,166)
5. Ohio - 17.9% ($725,000 / $4,057,526)
6. Western Michigan - 17.5% ($420,000 / $2,398,421)
7. Ball State - 16.9% ($435,000 / $2,572,793)
8. Eastern Michigan - 16.6% ($400,000 / $2,410,498)
9. Central Michigan - 16.5% ($420,000 / $2,549,635)
10. Bowling Green - 16.5% ($467,250 / $2,838,564)
11. Miami (OH) - 10.5% ($306,000 / $2,901,957)
12. Northern Illinois* - 10.0% ($350,000 / $3,501,500)
13. Buffalo - 9.6% ($435,000 / $4,538,362)
* Even though NIU is leaving the MAC, I still choose to include them because the data is from a time where they were in the conference.
With the exception of Miami, which I'll address separately, the bottom half of this list is made up of programs that have struggled to compete consistently in recent years. Spending less on your coach and losing isn't a model worth pointing to.
There's a pretty clear pattern in the top half too. Kent State, Akron, and Toledo are all spending a higher percentage of their budget on their coach than Ohio and have been more competitive. Ohio at 17.9% is mid-pack, not an outlier.
Boals is confirmed as one of the top 3 highest paid coaches in the conference by raw dollars, and likely drops to fourth if Steele signs the extension Rothstein reported. But raw dollars only tell part of the story. Ohio has one of the larger operating budgets in the conference, which means that salary represents just 17.9% of the overall budget, squarely mid-pack. There are two sides to this spectrum and both matter.
On the schools paying less and beating us, that's a fair point and I'll take it fully. Kent State and Toledo are both spending less in raw dollars on their coach and operating on smaller overall budgets, and both have outperformed us. These numbers don't capture NIL and revenue share, which are now significant variables, but even before you factor that in we are getting outperformed by programs with less to work with. That's the most legitimate criticism in this entire thread and there's no way to spin it.
On what market we are keeping up with and how we fund it, the MAC is the peer group and that's where the comparison starts and ends for me. But that's the harder question and I don't think there's a clean answer. We know schools like Western Michigan, Miami, and Akron are benefiting from significant financial support from individual donors. These aren't institutional investments in the traditional sense, they are private donor pipelines that most programs simply don't have access to. Ohio doesn't have that and it's really difficult to manufacture. The honest reality is that competing with programs that have that kind of private money flowing in is a different problem than just figuring out what percentage of the operating budget goes to the coach. You can optimize every line item on the budget and still be at a structural disadvantage if the guy next door has a benefactor writing checks that don't show up in any MFRS report.
On whether the investment is paying off, it depends on the window you're looking at. In 2021 the answer was clearly yes. The two to three years after that produced solid teams with legitimate MAC contention. The last two seasons are a different story and I don't think anyone would argue otherwise. My point is not that Jeff Boals specifically is worth that figure. It's that whoever coaches Ohio at a competitive level is probably going to command something in that range based on where the market sits. You can't separate the salary discussion from the job itself.
On Miami, their 10.5% is a genuine outlier and the context matters. Steele was fired by Xavier in 2022 with years remaining on his contract. Xavier almost certainly owed him a significant buyout, which would have financially subsidized the early years of his Miami deal while he was earning just $300K. Miami didn't pioneer a new model of paying coaches less. They identified a Big East caliber coach who likely had the financial cushion of a recent buyout to take below market money and pounced on it. That's a very specific set of circumstances that isn't replicable on demand. Per Jon Rothstein, Miami has since offered Steele an extension that would make him one of the highest paid coaches in the conference. That number will spike and reflect what retaining a coach of his caliber actually costs.
On the front porch theory, to be clear I'm not here defending it as sound policy. I'm pointing out that it's how university administration typically justifies the cost of athletics. They are essentially chasing a dream season. Those seasons are incredibly rare, but all it takes is one run, even something like what Miami did this year, and there are real downstream impacts on applications, donor support, and the broader institutional bottom line. The problem is that chasing that outcome is often a pipe dream, and most programs spend years subsidizing the attempt without ever getting there.
Sources
Operating Budgets: FY25 MFRS data via Extra Points -
https://www.extrapointsmb.com/p/here-s-what-it-costs-to-m... Coaching Salaries: Pulled from publicly available records and reported figures in news articles. Figures reflect the most recently available compensation data for each coach through the 2025-26 season. In many cases these represent the closest available public figure, and actual compensation is likely higher once bonus and incentive structures are factored in.