Louisiana State University has one reason to be pleased about yesterday’s 21-0 loss to Alabama in the BCS championship game — the defeat saved the school from a six million dollar outlay.
LSU football coach Les Miles made $3.75 million in salary this year, plus another $400,000 in bonuses for winning the SEC championship and qualifying for the BCS. But he missed a huge payday by losing yesterday, since his contract has a clause guaranteeing him an automatic salary hike to $1,000 more than the highest-paid public university coach in the SEC if he ever wins a national championship.
That highest paid coach happens to be Alabama’s Nick Saban, who made $4.7 million this year (plus $400,000 for beating LSU yesterday). Over the six years remaining on Miles’s contract, that bump would have worked out to exactly $5,706,000.
The LSU system raised tuition some $14 million this year, with plans for another $38 million in 2012-13. Miles’s salary hike would have amounted to $40 per student per year.
Whew.
studentactivism.net 
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
January 10, 2012 at 4:46 pm
noah
surely a private sponsor pays Miles’s salary, like nearly every other big time and semi-big time college coach.
January 11, 2012 at 10:17 am
Angus Johnston
The majority of Miles’ salary comes from the Tiger Athletic Foundation, a 501c3 affiliated with LSU. But TAF funding underwrites a variety of LSU’s athletics-related expenses, including scholarships, facilities maintenance, and debt service.
TAF exists as a way for LSU to manage a portion of its revenue and expenses, in other words, not as an independent, separately funded and managed, entity.