Coastal Carolina had good reason to give coach a raise
To show they could compete with the big boys of college football, the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers didn’t just need to win 11 of their 12 games last year and finish 14th in the nation.
They decided they needed to drastically increase the pay of their football coach at a time when their athletic department had been hurting from painful cutbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic, including layoffs and furloughs. It was a sensitive move last December. How could they justify boosting the pay of Jamey Chadwell to an average of $1 million annually in guaranteed pay?
“Certainly, we understand what the perception was,” athletic director Matt Hogue told USA TODAY Sports, referring to the timing of the pay raise. “But I think for our institution, it was a strategic move and over time could be a costeffective move.”
One season later, CCU is 6-0 and ranked 16th in the USA TODAY Sports AFCA Coaches poll. In the bigger picture, a recent surge in enrollment at CCU helps show the reason behind this decision. It also helps show why many schools decided to raise coaches’ pay during the pandemic despite making cutbacks and layoffs in other parts of the athletic departments – because football success can attract attention and more revenue.
In CCU’s case, the Chanticleers received unprecedented media exposure last year as they burst onto the national stage, including their first time being ranked in the Top 25, their first time earning a postseason bowl berth and their first time hosting ESPN’s “College GameDay.”
This fall, CCU, a relatively small university near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, enrolled the largest freshman class in school history with more than 2,500 students, up 9% from 2019, according to figures provided to USA TODAY Sports.
Hogue noted that while football wasn’t the only reason students chose CCU, it likely played a role when universities could not recruit in person.
“Anecdotally, I have to think the positive media coverage nationally increased visibility for CCU and could have prompted prospective students to explore CCU and apply,” said Amanda Craddock, CCU’s associate vice president for enrollment management. “Football’s success was happening at the same time as high school seniors were applying to college, so the timing was really good.”
But the timing for Chadwell’s new contract wasn’t so good last December, when the university gave him an extension through 2027 that more than doubled his pay from the $375,000 he was scheduled to make in 2020.
Last fall amid COVID-19 restrictions, Hogue said his department sustained 15% budget cuts, which amounted to
about $4 million. He said the cutbacks affected about 41 positions, including furloughs and layoffs of assistant coaches in non-revenue sports.
Before he got his new contract terms, Chadwell also was scheduled to take a pandemic pay cut of about $56,000. Then came his 11-0 run to start the season, making him a hot candidate for vacancies at bigger programs. It gave the school a choice – do something to help keep him or risk losing momentum by having to start over with a new coach.
Hogue said football’s success had helped improve the budget outlook by December. He said most of the lost jobs were restored starting in January, bringing the total number of employees to about 115 in an athletic department supporting about 450 student-athletes.
Chadwell’s $1 million in average pay may look small compared to the 21 coaches making at least $5 million. That’s about 2.6% of CCU’s $37.9 million in revenue for 2018-19. By comparison, Tom Herman was scheduled to make $6 million last year at Texas, which also is about 2.6% of Texas’ revenue of $224 million in 2018-19.
“Success has a way of driving that recovery,” Hogue said. “It played a role that we were on TV a lot . ... That was a big push that helped to maybe in a sense collateralize the decision we were making – that we felt was sound.”