LUBBOCK — Texas Tech is set to pay its full-time football assistant coaches 9.7% more than the stipulated salary pool for this year, significantly more than the 3% annual increase as a group they are guaranteed in head coach Matt Wells’ contract.
The increase is related to the amount Tech needed to bring in veteran defensive assistants Derek Jones from Duke and Kevin Cosgrove from LSU. Jones, at $500,000 a year, and Cosgrove, at $300,000 a year, will make $310,000 more between them than the coaches they replaced.
It is the third year in a row — Kliff Kingsbury’s last year and Wells’ first two years — that Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt has authorized more for assistants than the amount guaranteed in the head coaches’ contracts.
Barring any more staff changes this offseason, Tech is set to pay the current group of 10 assistants $3.73 million.
The contract Wells signed when Tech hired him in December 2018 started his assistants’ salary pool at $3.3 million, guaranteed to increase by at least 3 percent a year, making this year’s baseline amount $3.399 million.
“I think the takeaway,” Tech senior associate athletics director Robert Giovannetti said, “is that Kirby is committed to having success in football, and I don’t think that he has ever allowed the budget to be a constraint to that.
“And not just in football. If you look at the other sports, just think of coaches that we are paying competitively nationally — obviously (Tim) Tadlock, (Chris) Beard, Mark Adams, (Wes) Kittley, J-Bob Thomas, James Thomas, (Greg) Sands, (Tom) Stone, (Todd) Petty. All those guys have received contracts to keep them in place.”
In the spring and summer of 2018, Hocutt and the Tech System Board of Regents signed off on contract extensions for Beard, Kittley, Petty, Tadlock and Sands. That was right after they led Tech teams to finishes of top eight or better in NCAA tournament competition in men’s basketball, men’s track and field, women’s tennis, baseball and men’s golf.
USA Today’s annual national survey of basketball coaches’ pay released this month showed Beard as the fifth highest-paid coach in the country. Adams, Beard’s defensive architect, ranks highly among his peers as well.
Tech gave Adams a two-year contract last summer after the Red Raiders’ run to the championship game of the NCAA Tournament. In gathering salary information at the time, Tech officials found only one other men’s college basketball assistant making more than they gave Adams in his new deal.
According to Tech sources, Texas A&M wanted to hire Tech baseball assistant J-Bob Thomas last summer. Tech track and field coach Wes Kittley said that in recent years Southern California and Arkansas, who also have premier programs, have shown serious interest in Tech associate head coach James Thomas.
J-Bob Thomas has been assistant coach and recruiting coordinator on the Tadlock staff that has led Tech to the College World Series four times in six years. James Thomas has been the coach of former Tech high jumpers JaCorian Duffield, Trey Culver and Zarriea Willis, who each won two NCAA titles, and Bradley Adkins, who finished second at two NCAA meets and made the 2016 Olympics.
Since 2017, the Tech football assistants’ salary pool has gone up by $1.025 million; however, its staff still has been paid less than most in the Big 12.
USA Today has compiled a pay survey on FBS football assistants annually for the past 11 years. Among the 64 football-playing programs in the Power Five conferences, Tech typically has ranked in the bottom half.
The recent bump could move the Red Raiders’ assistants closer to the middle, depending on what the other schools in their range do. The 2019 survey released in December showed that 43 Power Five programs were paying their assistants more than Tech and seven were paying less, with USA Today unable to obtain the information on the 13 others, mostly private schools that are not obligated to disclose.
Tech’s collective increase from $3.3 million to $3.73 million could move Wells’ staff up 10 spots from last year, including above Kansas State and Kansas in the Big 12. That’s uncertain, however, as other schools make adjustments of their own from one year to the next.
What is known, Giovannetti said, is Hocutt will free up the money necessary to bring in assistants his head coach wants.
“No one has ever come to Kirby and said, ‘I want to hire this person, and Kirby said, ‘No, we can’t afford that,’ ” Giovannetti said.
He said an example was Tech’s hiring of veteran assistant Mark Tommerdahl as associate head coach, special teams coordinator and assistant offensive line coach. The day after Tech hired Wells in November 2018, Football Scoop, which specializes in covering the college coaching realm, reported that Wells wanted to bring Tommerdahl from Purdue.
Nearly three months passed, however, before Tech finally added Tommerdahl to the staff after negotiating the price.
Wells, at his request, brought seven assistants with him from Utah State. (The number dropped to six when receivers coach Jovon Bouknight left for Oregon after 2 months.) Then he filled in the remaining spots.
“Wells went after the best coaches that he felt would have an interest and that he felt fit our situation,” Giovannetti said. “They negotiated for them a competitive package to join the staff, and that’s where we are.”
Shortly before the 2019 season, Tech added a full-time football recruiting position and a football social media position that are not taken into account in the assistants’ salary pool.
Aaron Burks, a former Boise State wide receiver and Washington support staff member, was hired to the former job. His title is director of player personnel. His duties include managing the outbound marketing of Tech’s recruiting operation, implementing strategies for summer recruiting camps and assisting with recruits’ campus visits.
Tech hired Teagan Smith from Colorado State as the football program’s director of graphic design.
“Traditionally the stuff that Teagan does, we had been doing it with kind of a two-headed approach,” Giovannetti said. “We had been contracting with someone out of North Carolina, a graphic designer. And then our team in our marketing office would help with that, too.
“But we decided to keep that in-house, get a full-time person still working with our marketing team. Our marketing team will still help with the graphics and do some of those football things, but Teagan will do the things directly to recruits.”
