Syracuse head coach Dino Babers calls over a player as the Syracuse Orange football team battled the Georgia Tech Yellowjackets Saturday, November 18, 2023.N. Scott Trimble | strimble@syracuse.com
Syracuse, N.Y. — Syracuse University football coach Dino Babers received what is believed to be the biggest buyout in school history when he was fired after the 2023 season.
Babers received just under $8.9 million in severance pay from the school.
In total, Babers was paid just over $13 million by the school in 2023, following a season in which the Orange finished 6-7 and was blown out in the Boca Raton Bowl.
That amount included both his salary for coaching the team and his contract buyout.
The figures were included in the school’s most recent federal tax documents, which were requested by Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard and are required to be disclosed by all non-profit organizations.
Babers made $3.8 million in base salary for the year, as well as bonuses and incentives worth an additional $240,000.
Syracuse’s tax forms did not specify how many years of Babers’ contract were bought out. The amount seems to correspond with two years of pay.
The numbers will be eye-popping to some but are not unusual at the Power-Four level of college athletics where exorbitant buyouts became common late in an era in which schools created rules that prohibited them from paying players.
Texas A&M, for instance, paid $76 million to buy out head coach Jimbo Fisher after the 2023 season. That is believed to be the highest buyout for a college football coach in history.
In 2023, Front Office Sports reported that schools paid football coaches more than $118 million in order to get them to leave their jobs.
Syracuse fired Babers with one game remaining in the 2023 season and the team sitting at 5-6.
Syracuse athletic director John Wildhack said afterward that Babers needed to win at least seven regular-season games for the school to bring him back.
Current head football coach Fran Brown was hired after the season and won 10 games in his first year.
The buyout amount for Babers was dictated by a contract extension that Syracuse negotiated with the coach five years earlier after the Orange won 10 games in 2018, his third year with the program.
Babers coached eight seasons at SU with an overall record of 41-55 and a conference record of 20-45.
That contract extension didn’t work out particularly well for the school’s football team, but it was widely celebrated at the time it was announced.
Syracuse was coming off its first 10-win season in 16 years when the extension was announced, and there were fears Babers could use a strong season as a springboard to other opportunities like former head coach Doug Marrone did when he left SU for the Buffalo Bills after the 2012 season.
Including Babers, Syracuse University’s three highest-paid employees in 2023 were members of the athletic department.
Babers was followed by men’s basketball coaches Jim Boeheim and Adrian Autry.
Boeheim made just under $2.7 million in compensation during a year in which he coached the final season of his 47-year career.
Boeheim left the head-coaching position in March of 2023, departing after a year in which the Orange finished 17-15 and missed the NCAA Tournament. He took a job as special assistant to the athletic director after the season.
Boeheim was paid $1.5 million in base salary for the year and awarded just over $1 million in bonuses and incentives.
Syracuse’s tax form did not indicate what the bonuses or incentives were for. The amount Boeheim received was unusually high for an SU coach.
Current Syracuse men’s basketball coach Adrian Autry earned just under $1.8 million in total compensation in 2023, which included a salary of $1.7 million.
That stretch of time includes approximately 10 months as the team’s head coach following his hiring in early March. It’s the first indication of what Autry’s salary is to lead the basketball program.
That overall number for 2023 would place Autry at No. 66 on USA Today’s most recent database of head coach salaries, placing him just behind what VCU paid Ryan Odom (recently hired away by Virginia) and ahead of Duke’s Jon Scheyer.
Syracuse Chancellor Kent Syverud ranked fourth among the school’s highest-compensated employees, making more than $1.7 million in total compensation and a salary of just over $1 million.
He was followed by two members of his administration — Syracuse Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff Candace Campbell Jackson and Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives & Innovation and Executive Dean of the Whitman School of Management Michael Haynie.
Former Syracuse football defensive coordinator Rocky Long ranked sixth among SU employees in overall compensation and had the fifth-highest listed salary at the school at $898,600. He made just over $940,000 in total compensation in 2023.
The tax form requires non-profit organizations to list their five highest-paid employees, as well as salaries for other key figures.
Long’s compensation package approaches the most money ever to be paid to a Syracuse football coordinator. Former defensive coordinator Tony White made $963,000 in total compensation in 2022 before leaving to take a job at Nebraska. White is now the defensive coordinator at Florida State.
According to USA Today’s most recent database of college football coaching salaries there were at least 78 assistants in college football making at least $1 million annually last year. Ten of those coaches work in the ACC, while the majority work in the SEC or Big Ten.
In a final indication of how big the business of college sports is at Syracuse, the two contractors that SU paid the most money in 2023 both worked on athletic initiatives.
The school paid $2.3 million to Legends, a company that does sports marketing and offers support to ticketing operations. Syracuse also paid $2 million to Populous, an architecture firm whose work is focused on stadiums and arenas.
Both of those totals were higher than the amount the school paid its preferred local law firm, Barclay Damon, which ranked third on that list at just under $1.9 million.
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