Texas football coach Steve Sarkisian said he doesn’t know if the coaching staff he’ll field for the 2026 season is better or worse than the one he brought into 2021, his first year with the Longhorns.
Here’s what is for sure: That coaching staff is a lot more expensive.
How much have things changed since Sarkisian’s first day on the job? Well, his initial group of three coordinators — Jeff Banks, Kyle Flood and Pete Kwiatkowski — earned a combined $2.78 million in 2021. New Texas defensive coordinator Will Muschamp alone is entitled to $2.7 million in 2026.
“I try to look at it from a broad scope of what’s happening around the country with the top programs in the country,” Sarkisian said during a media availability Monday. “We’re not going to do things in our program just because they’re doing it over there. But again, I think we have to monitor what’s happening and some of the things that are going on. And staff size has grown. Coaches’ salaries have grown. I think that’s kind of been natural throughout this process.”
The inflation Sarkisian described is most powerfully illustrated through head coaching salaries. In 2021, USA TODAY’s annual roundup of contracts for coaches at public schools did not include a single salary over $10 million. In 2025, there were nine coaches earning 10 figures. Remarkably, three of them failed to win eight games last year.
Assistant salaries have been steadily climbing, too. Last season, Muschamp’s $2.7 million payday would have ranked second nationally among coordinators behind Penn State’s Jim Knowles, who earned $3.1 million. Knowles’ defense ranked 30th nationally and he was not retained by Matt Campbell, who took over as the Nittany Lions’ head coach following James Franklin’s midseason firing.
Further down the chain from the big money coordinators, recent college football changes are driving assistant salary pools up — sometimes by virtue of a technicality. In 2024, the NCAA passed new legislation to essentially permit programs to hire unlimited assistant coaches, although only 10 can participate in off-campus recruiting activities.
In practice, that means staff members who previously held “Analyst” or “Quality Control” titles can now be labeled assistant coaches, without much change in their day-to-day job descriptions. As of Monday, Texas listed 13 assistant coaches on its roster page.
When explaining the increased staff investment, Sarkisian said he believed he had a responsibility to his players to put the best possible coaches around them in order to prepare them for NFL futures.
“I think the things that we’ve done along the way and the journey that we’ve been on have not only adapted to college football as college football has changed …but also putting people in our place to serve our players and to serve this program to be the best that they can be,” Sarkisian said. “I don’t know if (the staff) is better or worse. I just think that we’ve evolved with the times.”
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