David Lombardi, ESPN Staff Writer 8y

Washington's Chris Petersen leads Pac-12 in base salary

The San Jose Mercury News' Jon Wilner did some legwork to compile known public information about the salaries of Pac-12 coaches, and he gathered enough to assemble a pay ranking.

The list isn't comprehensive (there's no information on USC coach Clay Helton's pay). Wilner also acknowledges that it's not a fully apples-to-apples comparison -- not all of the salary data comes from the most recent year since public and private institutions face differing reporting requirements -- but the piece does provide a very solid ballpark representation of what each Pac-12 member school is paying its football coach.

Washington's Chris Petersen tops the league with a base salary of about $3.6 million, trailed by UCLA's Jim Mora ($3.45 million). Oregon's Mark Helfrich and Utah's Kyle Whittingham are tied for third place at $3.3 million, while Arizona's Rich Rodriguez and Arizona State's Todd Graham round out the $3 million club.

It seems as if this upcoming 2016 season will go a long way toward determining who is overpaid and who is underpaid in the conference, and Wilner points out as much. Petersen's leading salary, for example, will certainly seem appropriate if the Huskies continue on their upward trajectory and live up to some lofty preseason expectations. Mora, on the other hand, needs his UCLA team to correct course after a disappointing ending to 2015 to avoid the "overpaid" tag.

A particularly interesting case is the one of Stanford coach David Shaw, who has guided his program to three of the past four Pac-12 championships. It was recently reported that Shaw earned about $4.1 million in total compensation in 2014 -- the most recent year available on Stanford's federal returns.

Though Wilner's piece lists Shaw's base 2014 salary as only $2.65 million, that total combined with the coach's extra earnings and deferred compensation would place him at or near the top of this list -- significant news, considering that Shaw's predecessor, Jim Harbaugh, barely cracked $1 million in total pay during his last year at Stanford.

Oregon State's Gary Andersen and Colorado's Mike MacIntyre fall at the bottom of the pay list. If their programs can discover winning ways moving forward, we may see an upward climb in those salaries.

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