At the other extreme, we have a ton of players offering their services at minimum salary, which is $750,000 per year, and Kevin Stefanski is making $3.5 million per year, so the balance here favors the coach.
Getting into normalcy will be more telling. Of the 12 highest-paid coaches and the 5 lowest-paid coaches listed above, there are another 15, and while it’s impossible to say for sure, if we include Lafleur and Sirianni, we can assume their annual salaries are in Between $5 and $7 million, so there are 17 people in this income range, so we can assume that’s what most people earn. Meanwhile, players earn an average of about $2.8 million annually. The difference was once again in the coach’s favor.
What may be problematic is considering the extreme cases, those who are paid more or worse, and as we have seen there is a huge gap between players and coaches that seems difficult to reconcile, especially when we consider that there are 55 Players currently make an average of $20 million more than the highest-paid head coach in the NFL, and as we go down the list of coaches’ salaries, the list of players who are paid more than them gets bigger and bigger. .
A lot will depend on the analytical approach to determining whether so many players are more valuable to the team than the head coach, especially if we factor in each individual’s responsibility and risk.
Players, especially those whose salary levels exceed those of their coaches, are often easily recognized by fans, who are certainly on their second contracts as professionals and are under constant pressure to perform at the highest level without any excuses on the pitch. Putting their physical health at risk, remember that the average NFL player’s career is three and a half years, so they’re already living beyond the norm and are racing against time to maximize financial gain.
In comparison, a coach’s career is usually much longer, especially since it takes time to reach a prime position, during which they are already earning money, but not at the highest level, and working on their profits for a lifetime. In terms of their responsibilities, they have to deal with more people, they are managers of all sporting aspects of the team, supplemented by consultants and assistants who specialize in each area, from the most tactical, such as weekly Game plan. Player nutrition and physical preparation, team travel logistics, relations with the media… they are also under pressure to perform at the highest level, which means everyone does their job to the highest standards. This ends up being exhausting in a less dramatic way, but just as intense for the players.
When players arrive at the team facility at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. to practice and work on game plans, that’s likely just two or three hours before the coach leaves to go home to sleep and take a shower before starting the day.
The health aspect is a whole new layer of complications. Coaches suffer from stress, gastritis and other ailments that come from late nights and bad times, which in the worst cases can lead to heart and blood vessel disease. Mike Ditka in 1988, Dan Reeves in 1990, Bill Parcells in 1992, Chuck Pagano in 2012 and Bruce Arians in 2016 are just a few examples.
At the same time, players are more vulnerable to injury. Just to recap, three of the seven highest-paid players have not played or will not play the entire 2023 season: Joe Burrow with a wrist injury, Kyler Murray with a knee injury, and Deshaun Watson with a shoulder injury. hurt. If we look further into this list, we see that Daniel Jones and Aaron Rodgers (No. 12 and 13 on the highest-paid list) are also unavailable for their teams.
Teams take a huge risk when awarding a big contract, whether it’s a player or a head coach, because players like the Raiders’ Jon Gruden, the Jaguars’ Urban Meyer, the Colts’ Frank Cases like Reich (and later the Colts and Panthers) and the Panthers’ Matt Rhule are just a few examples of recent bets that have gone bad.