I will give you a direct answer. When I hire someone, I know what the market is, and what I will have to offer to get the quality of person that I need. MAC salaries are no different, and they have doubled because they move in the free market, and the schools have bid up the price that must necessarily be paid to get the quality of coach they want. In case you hadn't noticed, salaries for coaches have gone up at all levels, not just in the MAC.
It just feels pretty arbitrary to me to define the market so narrowly and base it entirely on pay at the 11 other schools in the conference. That Toledo thinks 45-27 with a single conference championship in 7 seasons is worth 1 million a year doesn't strike me as a particularly good reason to increase our pay.
What is a coach "worth"? How do you determine that? That's for the free market to decide, and I won't even venture a guess.
I admit that I'm half tempted to post a poll, though, and ask this: "If some high school coach from near Athens, with no college coaching experience whatsoever, could be hired for $250,000, would the fans support such a hire in order to save money."
Are you suggesting there are no metrics that can be used to determine the (very often) highest paid (or second highest paid, maybe) employee brings to a University? If so, I'm doubling down on my stance that coaching salaries are a completely irrational market.
In theory, sports are a loss leader at most schools that increase alumni engagement, which leads to alumni donations. That seems like a pretty clear metric one can use to measure a coaches worth, and you should see a pretty clear correlation between wins and losses and alumni giving. I'd be surprised if that's not the case. I don't think it's an impossible task to value the worth of a football coach.
I admit that I'm half tempted to post a poll, though, and ask this: "If some high school coach from near Athens, with no college coaching experience whatsoever, could be hired for $250,000, would the fans support such a hire in order to save money."
At what point did anybody suggest hiring a local high school coach?
The one example I provided is that Maine won a very competitive FCS conference -- one that's had recent national champions in JMU and Richmond -- with a coach making $150k. The point's that there's a whole market of presumably capable coaches outside of the MAC, being paid much less, who are part of the free market for coaches and hirable for less than MAC schools have begun paying. There's a lot of space between Jason Candle's salary and $150k.
Is there anybody here that wants to make the case that MAC schools are getting their money's worth for these coaches and there aren't dozens of hungry, capable coaches who could well out-perform Tim Albin that could be hired for less? That MAC's made their bed and set the market too high. But because they did so doesn't make it smart, and to pretend the only other alternative is to pay a high school coach $150k is pretty disingenuous.
Our record against FCS schools over the last 6 years since 2016 is a whopping 3-2, with a close win over Howard keeping us above .500. And we're not scheduling top 25 teams at that level, for good reason. As Hyatt pointed out, we have greater resources, much better facilities, and substantially larger coaching budgets. And yet on the field our program may not be better than the top FCS schools, and is has lost to mediocre FCS schools over the last few years.
Forgive me if I'm skeptical that our budget helps the league hire the best of the best, and that there's not opportunity to perform just as well spending less.