According to one of the tOSU sites, Ohio State Head Coach Jake Diebler's contract is five years at a base salary of $2.5M with the following bonuses:
- $25k for B1G Championship or co
- $50k for B1G Tournament Championship
- $25k for NCAA Appearance as an at-large (I assume this means that if they win the B1G Tournament, he doesn't get an extra $25k because they'd be an auto-bid.)
- $50k for S16
- $75k for E8
- $100k for F4
- $250k for NC but this one is explicitly NOT cumulative with the $100k F4 bonus
- $50k for B1G or national COTY (total for either or both)
So as I read it, the maximum bonus is:
- $75k for B1G regular season and Tournament Championships plus
- $50k for S16, $125k total
- $75k for E8, $200k total
- $250k for NC, $450k total
- $50k for COTY, $500k total
Honestly, it feels like tOSU is being unnecessarily cheap here with the bonuses. Realistically, if Diebler wins a NC they are going to give him raise MUCH bigger than $500k so why not make it official within the contract? IIRC, they were paying Holtmann about $4.5M and that was on the higher end in the B1G but not the highest.
I think it is smart to load up the bonuses anyway for two reasons:
- Success brings money to the program so the bonuses pay for themselves.
- In the event that it goes sideways and you end up having to fire a guy the bonuses aren't guaranteed so you don't have to pay them as a buyout.
If Ohio State wins B1G regular season and Tournament Championships, Diebler wins COTY, and the Buckeyes win the NC, the University will have LOTS of cash from all the tickets they'll have sold to a packed arena for a contender and all the merch they'll sell. In that case, the half a Million in bonuses will be pocket change. Why not double or triple all the bonuses? If they were tripled and he got all of them it will still only be $1.5M and bring his total to $4M which is still less than they were paying Holtmann.
To clarify, this post isn't meant to be too specific to Diebler and I'm not really advocating for higher salaries for coaches. My point is more about the structures of contracts because it makes a LOT of sense to me to lean more toward bonuses. If the team sucks and/or you have to fire a coach you don't have to pay the bonuses and if the team has a lot of success you don't mind paying them because you've got plenty of money laying around anyway. If I were AD, I'd be all in for increasing the bonuses by an order of magnitude in exchange for a slight reduction in base.