Analyzing Big East Coach Salaries in 2025

As is tradition at this point, I like to obsessively refresh 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 6 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 2025 tax year.

Active 2025 Coaches

As you may have noticed right away, the 2nd highest paid coach in the Big East in 2025 wasn’t actually coaching. St. John’s Mike Anderson was paid a whopping $7.8M 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 and 3 time finalist, all in the past 4 years, Dan Hurley is making twice as much as the next highest paid coach in the league (Ed Cooley) and he deserves every penny. Rarely do you see such outliers and can say it’s probably still a bargain, but Hurley is easily in that camp. He has built UConn into a national dynasty once more.

Shaka got a big jump with a contract extension in 2024, and saw another significant raise in 2025, up to $4.68M, third most in the conference.

Rich as Cooley

One of the things I was most interested in learning about last year was how large Ed Cooley’s salary bump was at Georgetown, seeing as he left a great thing he had built at Providence. But the salary listed only had him at just shy of $4M, which felt low.

In 2025, his 2nd year as head coach of the Hoyas, Cooley zoomed past every coach not named Hurley to become just the 2nd coach in the league to ever top $5M a year.

And this gets to some of the frustration Georgetown fans must be feeling. Despite some dismal seasons since 2018, Hoya coaches have earned $45.3M from the school, which is the most any Big East school has spent in that time period.

And for those wondering what that full top-5 since 2018 looks like (including coaching buyouts):

Georgetown: $45.3M
Villanova: $37.2M
UConn: $36.1M
Marquette: $34.1M
St. John’s: $27.4M

Mike Anderson Buyout

Which brings us to Mike Anderson, former coach of St. John’s. He was fired for cause in 2023, which meant the school would not have to pay his buyout figure as agreed to in his contract. Anderson sued the school in response.

The lawsuit was settled in court, meaning we wouldn’t get to see what the school and Anderson agreed to. However, it appears that number was $7.84M, as that’s what was listed in St. John’s tax filings as payment to the former coach. If you add the $538K that was left over from 2024, Anderson received almost $8.4M total.

There could be another payment still to come, as sometimes the buyouts are phased over multiple years so we’ll keep an eye out for that.

Post Employment Pay

And while we’re on the topic of buyouts, the Big East has now had 3 separate cases of school spending $8M plus to pay coaches that are no longer employed, with Patrick Ewing, Steve Wojciechowski and Anderson leading the way.

One note, Jay Wright was obviously not fired, but did receive compensation from Villanova for a few years after he retired, so wanted to note he’s not like the others necessarily. And Cooley was a weird timing quirk.

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 more than double from 2018 to 2025, collectively.

Yes, some of that is due to massive buyouts for Anderson, 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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