Jim Harbaugh is making $7.5 million this season to coach Michigan football. Jimbo Fisher is making roughly the same at Texas A&M. Only Alabama's Nick Saban ($8.3 million) and Ohio State's Urban Meyer ($7.6 million) are making more.
Such soaring salaries seem more suited to Wall Street than Sesame Street, but let's borrow a sing-song game from the venerable children's show anyway: One of these things is not like the others.
Three of these coaches have won national championships. Harbaugh has not.
Nor has he won a Big Ten championship, or even a division title; his Wolverines have finished third, third and fourth in the Big Ten East. Oh, and his record against bitter rivals Ohio State and Michigan State is a lamentable 1-5.
The brassy fight song _ "Hail! to the victors valiant. Hail! to the conqu'ring heroes" _ sounds a tad hollow when none of the victors' victories come against ranked teams on the road.
All of which leads to a leading question: Is Harbaugh really worth $5.5 million plus $2 million in premiums for a creative life insurance policy that can create millions more down the road?
"Absolutely," Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel says. "Every dime."
Rodney Fort, a sports economist and professor of sport management at Michigan who is sometimes critical of college athletic spending, also thinks the answer is yes. He points out Harbaugh has been highly successful in creating interest and filling seats.
"You have to put 107,601 of the nicest people every week into the hole that Yost dug," Fort says.
That would be Fielding Yost, U-M's coach when Michigan Stadium opened in 1927. The cost to build the Big House then: $950,000 _ or roughly $13.7 million in today's dollars, not enough to pay Harbaugh for two seasons.
As it happens, $950,000 was the average salary when USA TODAY began its analyses of coaches' salaries in major-college football in 2006. That's more than $1.2 million in today's dollars. This season, among the same group of schools studied in 2006, that average salary has more than doubled to $2.6 million. And Harbaugh makes nearly triple that.
Harbaugh declined to speak for this article through an athletics department spokesperson, but the Fox station in Detroit asked him in 2015 whether he was worth his princely pay.
No, Harbaugh said.
Well, should he give some back?
"Nah," Harbaugh said then, "I like making a buck just like the next guy."
That TV interview was lighthearted fun: Harbaugh hadn't coached a game at Michigan yet and Wolverines fans still luxuriated in the giddiness of possibility. His storyline was storybook: Former U-M ball boy and quarterback coming home from a successful stint coaching in the NFL. Cue the marching band. Play the fight song. Visions of national championships danced in fans' heads.
These days, with Harbaugh in the fourth season of his seven-season deal, the fan base largely stands by him, though some cracks are beginning to show.
"This is the first year patience is starting to wear thin," says Mike Persak, co-managing sports editor of The Michigan Daily, the school's student newspaper. "People always bring up his record against rivals. He has only one win against Michigan State and Ohio State combined and then he lost at Notre Dame earlier this year."
That was the Wolverines' season opener. Michigan president Mark Schlissel spoke at the Detroit Economic Club days later. The theme was the state of research at the state's research universities, but the first question concerned Harbaugh's status.
"He is not on the hot seat," Schlissel said. "He is under contract for four more years," including the rest of this season.
Schlissel declined to be interviewed for this article, according to an administration spokesperson who provided a statement from the president: "Coach Harbaugh embraces everything the University of Michigan is about and I fully support him. His student-athletes take their studies seriously and they graduate. He makes a commitment to each player that he brings to campus. Coach sets the tone in wanting to win every single game, and more importantly, he wants every student-athlete to have a great, full U-M experience while they're doing it."
