Roger Noll insists that he’s not looking for an I-told-ya-so time. However, the Stanford professor emeritus and analyst may have made the decision this month in light of the reports that Oklahoma State and Florida State are attempting to recover their head football coaches ‘ potential earnings with the intention of dispersing those funds among athletes.
” I’m not surprised by it, and I expect it to continue ( and ) to be substantially greater in the next two or three years”, Noll, 84, said in a phone interview. The reality is that the changes to the NCAA rules that are taking place are putting a lot of the price of mentors on the decline right then.
Noll is unaware of the emerging active, but he foreshadowed it in federal prosecutor more than a decade ago when he testified for the plaintiffs inO’Bannon v. NCAA, which challenged the antitrust effect of the NCAA’s restrictions on players making NIL money.

Noll argued that the NCAA’s financial limitations on players caused “inefficient replacements” through “excessive expenditures on another inputs” in his fifth expert report, which was filed with the judge in February 2014. The skyrocketing rises in FBS school coaching earnings over the past quarter-century, from the low-sixties in the mid-1980s to the billions by the 2010s, were among those inputs.
Noll wrote that” a significant portion of the increase in coaches ‘ incomes would not have occurred if competition among schools had been held for their services,” just as competition has been held for coaches ‘ salaries.
In other words, the payment of a college coach and an athlete is intimately linked.
In the immediate evidence he gave on behalf of the players in NCAA v. Alston, sports analyst Dan Rascher echoed this idea six years later.
” It is a small like squeezing a blimp”, Rascher, stated, “knowing that the weather is really going to the other side of the bubble”.
Apart from Rascher, and a couple another economists, Noll says he has generally received pushback on this principle. However, he now has the first inklings of indisputable evidence in the midst of the House v. NCAA lawsuit, which received primary courtroom approval in October.
Mike Gundy, head football coach at Oklahoma State, announced on December 7 that he had agreed to a revised agreement that would decrease his$ 7.75 million monthly salary, with the money being reallocated to Cowboys people. Florida State and its coach Mike Norvell both agreed the next week that he would give up at least some of his$ 4.5 million salary for the next year despite receiving at least some of it through incentives. In order to help NIL opportunities for Tigers athletes, LSU head coach Brian Kelly announced that he and his wife would donate up to$ 1 million in matching funds to the Tiger Athletic Foundation’s Excellence Fund.

” I’ve explained to multiple students why this is true”, Noll said,” It’s remarkable how apparently non-intuitive it is that for a coach who makes$ 12 million a year, ]who then ] suddenly makes$ 8 million a year, that this is somehow closely linked to what’s happening with the college players. Obviously, that’s plausible. It’s not for an scholar”.
One thing that ties the three colleges together is that the football team that played below objectives. A year after the 13-0 Buccaneers were frozen out of the College Football Playoff, FSU cratered to a 2-10 report this time. At Oklahoma State, Gundy’s Cowboys have compiled a 3-9 history and were winless in Big 12 play this year. OSU does not perform in a bowl game for the first time since 2005. LSU, for its piece, finished 2024 tied for the eighth-best general report in the reconstructed SEC.
Each of those programs, like the remainder in college football, now faces a major renovation through the move portal, which Noll thinks may progressively drive down—or at least hold in abeyance—coach pay going forward. Because players now have the ability to follow a head coach who leaves to take over another school, that turnover is made even more significant. They can do so without losing a year of eligibility.
According to Noll, “one of the things you were buying in a coach was his ability to attract good players who would be paid much less than their contribution to the team.” ” And what that succeeded in doing is transferring the value of the best players to the coach because the players follow the coach around, as Deion Sanders did when he traveled to Colorado. Twenty-some of his players went with him”.
In a famous way, Sanders famously advised his current players to leave Jackson State in the late 20th century to make room for the” Louis]Vuitton]” talent he was bringing in, such as Travis Hunter, who won this year’s Heisman Trophy.

Noll claims that there will be more roster disruption when a highly sought-after head coach takes over a middle-of-the-road program, as Sanders did, despite the fact that roster turnover as a result of a coaching change has always occurred in college sports. Schools can no longer rely on improved athletic facilities, new dormitories, and non-monetary recruitment as their main means of attracting the best players.
The economist also thinks that this set of variables will affect coaching pay.
” If the House settlement is introduced, the value of college football coaches and college basketball coaches, but especially college football coaches, is going to go down substantially”, Noll said. ” I do believe the$ 10 million football coach era is over.”