In March, Colorado football agreed to a five-year, $54 million extension with Deion Sanders, elevating him into an exclusive club of college coaches earning at least $10 million per year.
As eye-opening as that raise was, Tom Rhoads, an economics professor at Towson University with a particular emphasis in sports, predicts that the market for coaching salaries will begin to level out in light of the NCAA’s settlement with Congress that now permits schools to use up to $20.5 million to pay their athletes.
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“That’s my guess because now the revenue has to be shared with student-athletes,” he said. “So it can’t all go to the coaching staff and especially the head coach. Schools are now starting to hire GMs because they’ve got to attract talent. It’s going to look very similar to the NFL and the NBA and the WNBA where the head coach to some extent is, I don’t want to say a figurehead anymore, but they’re really supposed to not get in the way of these really talented athletes. So I think that’s part of what’s going on.”
Time will tell whether that pans out. For now, what institutions are compensating coaches is an oft-discussed topic, especially when it comes to the University of Maryland. Here is a look at what the school is paying football’s Michael Locksley, men’s basketball’s Buzz Williams and women’s basketball’s Brenda Frese for the 2025-26 academic year and how their salaries compare to those of their Big Ten peers:
Locksley, 55, ranks as the fourth-lowest earner in the conference. That is not terribly surprising, Rhoads said.
“I don’t see anything out of the ordinary with it,” he said. “Within the Big Ten, Maryland is not one of those top teams for football in the Big Ten, and that’s just reality. So I think the salary that he has right now, I think that’s probably pretty standard.”
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Despite guiding the Terps to three consecutive bowl wins for the first time in program history, Locksley came under fire after last year’s squad limped to a 4-8 record and a 1-7 mark in the Big Ten. His record in College Park — which includes a six-game stint as interim coach in 2015 — is 33-41 and his mark in the league is 16-40, which is why Robert Sroka, an assistant professor of sport management at Towson, thinks that the returns thus far have been underwhelming despite Locksley’s rank in salary.
“If you’re trying to be the Pittsburgh Pirates of the Big Ten football, where media revenue allows the athletic department to retain a larger profit on lower salary costs and winning is secondary, then Locksley might be a bargain,” he wrote via email. “A true bargain would be found in a Moneyball approach where a coach is able to do much more with less. At this point, I doubt Locksley fits that definition.”
Williams’ high ranking among Big Ten coaches is based on the program’s history of success, which includes its recent run to its first Sweet 16 berth in the NCAA Tournament since 2016. It also comes with certain standards, Rhoads said.
“Recruiting for basketball has always been about trying to get the best high school kids that will be dominant for one or two years, and then you know they’re probably going to go to the NBA,” he said. “It’s different from the NFL. You’re not really trying as much to develop players when you’re a top team like Maryland. You’re just trying to get the best talent all the time out of high school. So I do think that salary is with the expectation that there’s always been a lot of really good high school basketball talent in the Maryland-DC-Virginia area and that the best talent is going to go to Maryland and not go anywhere else.”
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Did Maryland overpay for Williams, 52, after the debacle that unfolded when Kevin Willard left the program for Villanova just three days after the Sweet 16 run? Not necessarily, according to Sroka.
“Sure, there was alumni and fan pressure, but I think the Williams salary was more necessary to poach a successful coach from a very well-resourced SEC program,” he wrote. “If Willard had stayed and had another good season, he could’ve easily commanded the same salary from Maryland as Williams did. The Williams salary is reasonably reflective of where Maryland is in the pecking order of Big Ten men’s basketball and where Williams is in the realm of men’s basketball coaches.”
With an NCAA championship in 2006, three Final Four appearances and 14 league titles in the Atlantic Coast Conference and Big Ten, Frese, 55, is the most successful of Maryland’s “big three” coaches. But Julie Sommer, a Seattle-based attorney and former All-American swimmer at the University of Texas who has advocated for student-athlete rights, noted that Frese isn’t compensated as well as Locksley and Williams are.
“The true correlation isn’t simply with success but with the market value of the sport itself,” she wrote via email. “These salary figures reflect the established financial hierarchy of college athletics, where football and men’s basketball still command a vastly different — and higher — market rate than women’s basketball, regardless of the relative success and historical achievements of the coaches within their respective programs, and regardless of the growth of women’s basketball, both in popularity and viewership.”
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Since the program’s last Final Four berth in 2015, the Terps have failed to advance to the Sweet 16 four times and have not brought home a Big Ten crown since 2021. Sroka said recent results might not justify Frese’s spot at the top.
“Frese is being paid the salary of a consistent Final Four coach for pre-COVID Big Ten conference results,” he wrote. “For instance, in recent years Maryland’s performance hasn’t been that much better than Michigan’s Kim Barnes Arico, who makes less than half of Frese’s salary. Maryland might be wondering why they’re paying an elite price for second-tier results.”
Unlike Rhoads, Sommer thinks the bar for coaching salaries at Maryland has been set and will be difficult to reduce. She said that the desire to remain competitive in the Big Ten will force the school to pursue — and sometimes retain — top-dollar coaches, which has a trickle-down effect.
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“This means coaching salaries and now likely payments to athletes will be substantially footed by other students and taxpayers,” she wrote. “Like many universities around the country, Maryland is facing budget challenges due to reduced funding impacting the entire University system. This will result in furloughs, salary reductions for employees, and personnel cuts. When you have this further commercialization of athletics, de-emphasis of the athlete’s educational experience, substantial support coming from ever-escalating student fees and taxpayers, combined with system-wide budget shortfalls, you have to question not just the sustainability of it, but whether the system that has lost sight of its educational purpose.”
Have a news tip? Contact Edward Lee at eklee@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/EdwardLeeSun.
