The Wife: "So how much would a high school football coach make?"
Me: "Like the coach in Friday Night Lights? Like in a small town, working at a kinda poor school? Like 35, 40 K maybe."
"What about college?"
"Depends on the college."
"Well, like Florida."
"Florida? I don't know, maybe $3 million."[*]
(Incredulous) "THREE MILLION DOLLARS? To be a football coach?"
"Yeah, but it's one of the biggest football schools in the country. At most colleges, it would probably be more like several hundred thousand."
(Musing) "I should get into that. I'm just gonna need to learn what a down is."
[*] As it happens, I was pretty close; Will Muschamp, the new Florida coach, will average about $2.7 million a year. The last coach, Urban Meyer, made about $4 mil a year.
If nothing else, this exchange should prove that you don't need to know much about football to be a huge fan - and I mean HUGE fan - of "Friday Night Lights." Due to a scheduling quirk, you can now buy the whole final season on DVD as it's airing on NBC. She loves peeling off 2 or 3 episodes in a row, unshackled from network control. No ads is nice too.
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Old numbers:
http://www.statesman.com/sports/mack-brown-gets-raise-will-be-highest-paid-111715.html?cxtype=rss_ece_frontpage
http://westlakepicayune.com/2009/03/06/football-allman-contract-tops-115k-per-year/
(Westlake is a suburb of Austin and Odessa Permian is supposedly the high school FNL is modeled after.)
@ Julie -
Interesting! So the real-life coach made about $90K at Permian. Now that Coach Taylor (the coach on FNL) is at the downtrodden East Dillon, though, I assume the pay would be less.
BTW, if you haven't read the original H.G. Bissinger book the series is loosely based on, it's worth a read. It's nonfiction, which makes it even better.
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