Analyzing Big East Coach Salaries in 2024

Every late Spring, I start obsessively refreshing Marquette’s Office of Finance reports page, looking for an update to the school’s 990 tax form, which private non-profit institutions have to file with the IRS. Although it updates with the previous fiscal year’s data (July to June), it is the only “true” source of hard data we will get from the school. So it’s a pretty big deal.

For the past 5 years, I’ve specifically used it to track coaching salaries around the Big East, as all schools, save UConn, have to file the 990 as well. So even though there may be other sources of income supplementing coaching pay, this is by far the most credible basis for comparison.

(For UConn, which is a public institution without a 990, I’ve switched to using the publicly available data from Connecticut’s Open Payroll site. The totals for Dan Hurley differ a bit as that uses a calendar year rather than a fiscal year, so it won’t necessarily jive with reports in some instances, but it’s close enough and much easier to verify if you are interested in checking yourself.)

And to make it more interactive, I built a quick dashboard that will allow users to filter the data themselves by coach, school and year.

Salary Dashboard Link CLICK HERE

Here’s a screenshot of what that looks like. Again, I highly encourage you to click through and explore it yourself. Remember, it does not include anything that happened last season, but instead in the 2024 tax year.

Active 2024 Coaches

As you noticed right away, the highest paid coach in the Big East in 2024 wasn’t actually coaching. Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing was paid a whopping $12.5M to not coach, actually. And we’ll get to that in a bit.

But focusing on those that were, here’s a chart representing the coaching salaries.

As a 2-time national champion that was courted by every college job as well as very publicly by the Lakers, seeing Dan Hurley in a class of his own, financially, makes perfect sense.

Shaka got a big jump with a contract extension, with his base salary jumping from $2.8M in 2023 up to $3.6M in 2024. When you add in the performance and other bonuses, Shaka became the 2nd highest paid coach in the league.

Rich as Cooley

One of the things I was most interested in learning is how large Ed Cooley’s salary bump was at Georgetown, seeing as he left a great thing he had built at Providence.

Turns out, it wasn’t that much more (at least yet). Per the IRS filings, Cooley received just under $4M from the Hoyas last season, which was actually less than what he got in 2023 from the Friars ($4.7M), when bonuses are included. That shocked me.

Now, this is where I will note that despite tax years being similar, not all schools report the same way and we have no further detail. For example, I was quite surprised to learn Cooley received $1.1M from Providence in the 2024 year on top of what Georgetown paid him. I do have questions into Providence to ask about the timing, but it still is just meant to convey that despite this being official documents, there are are accounting variations we need to keep in mind.

Since 2018, Cooley has made the 3rd most money of all Big East coaches.

Pat on the back

Which brings us to the part where we can gleefully say Patrick Ewing is the highest paid Big East coach since 2018 despite being the only one that’s able to say he oversaw multiple seasons with a KenPom ranking below 150.

A good chunk of that number is his $11.6M buyout that somehow beat Wojo’s, but it counts nonetheless.

This should be the last time we see Ewing in these IRS filings for Georgetown, so I thought it deserved one more pat on the back for what may be the worst contract (from a school’s perspective) in Big East history.

What’s the Matta?

One real surprise for me was Thad Matta. He has a legacy at Butler and won big at Ohio State, but the results haven’t really been there in his 2nd stint at Butler. His first year (in terms of IRS filings), his base salary was $1.9M, which made him the 8th highest paid coach in the conference. It felt about right.

But in 2024, he saw a 34% increase in his pay, driven completely by a base salary jump that seems to not exactly match the on court production. That jump put him at $2.6M for the year, which was more than Rick Pitino made. For a school that has some of the lowest levels of revenue and spending in the league, this was definitely eye-opening.

Conclusion

Now that we are fully in a new era of universities paying players directly, and we start seeing fans bear a brunt of that via increased ticket prices, it’s important to step back and note that collectively, Big East schools have seen a coaching payments double from 2018 to 2024, collectively.

Yes, some of that is due to massive buyouts for Ewing and Wojo, but those kinds of mistakes still count and go to show that the conference continues to behave and spend like a top-tier power conference.

Once more, feel free to play around with the dashboard and see what sticks out to you.

Salary Dashboard Link CLICK HERE

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