Auburn's Chizik, and staff gets a bump in pay

Gene Chizik and his cohesive staff of assistants will all be a little richer next season and beyond.
Chizik’s salary has been raised from $1.9 million to $2.1 million and his assistants have followed suit with respectable raises of their own, maintaining their status as one of the best-compensated groups in the country, the Opelika-Auburn News confirmed Friday. All of the contracts, including Chizik’s, will be rolled over another year as well.
Chizik’s raise bumps him one spot higher in the SEC head coach pay rankings, moving him above South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier into eighth of 12.
Offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn received a 43 percent raise, making him Chizik’s top paid assistant and the highest-paid offensive coordinator in the SEC. Malzahn made $350,000 in 2009 and will make $500,000 in 2010, a little more than $30,000 more than LSU’s Gary Crowton.
The rest of the assistants received 10 percent raises.
Defensive coordinator Ted Roof will make $407,000 and assistant head coach/wide receivers coach Trooper Taylor will earn $352,000. Malzahn, Roof and Taylor are all signed to three-year deals through 2012, while the rest of the assistants are now locked up through the end of the 2011 season.
Here is a list of the rest of the salaries:
* Tracy Rocker — defensive line — $330,000
* Jeff Grimes — offensive line — $319,000
* Curtis Luper — recruiting coordinator/running backs — $286,000
* Tommy Thigpen — safeties — $275,000
* Phillip Lolley — cornerbacks — $231,000
* Jay Boulware — special teams/tight ends — $231,000
Chizik and his coaches combine to make $5.031 million — $571,000 more than 2009.
Auburn went 8-5 in 2009, a three-win improvement from Tommy Tuberville’s final season. The louder noise was made this offseason, though, as Chizik and Co. helped lock up one of the highest-ranked recruiting classes in program history, a consensus top five group of 32 signees.
Auburn was the only SEC team not to have any turnover on its coaching staff during the offseason.
“I think that’s a very big selling point to recruits. They want to go where you have stability,” Scout.com’s Southeastern recruiting manager Chad Simmons said in an interview earlier this month.
“Obviously the head coach is important, but how many times has a head coach recruited these kids one on one? Not very often. Their recruiting coach, their position coach, the other guys they build the relationships with, those are the guys that are important about these guys making their decisions and picking their school.
“I definitely think keeping that staff in tact is very big, not only for now but the future as well.”
Auburn hopes these raises and extensions will make that a trend.

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