The likely annual compensation for new Georgia Tech coach Geoff Collins isn't much of a surprise. Athletic director Todd Stansbury, asked if it was between $2.5 million and $3 million, told the AJC that "you'll be in the neighborhood."
That value would be in the bottom half of the ACC, beneath the $3.1 million salary for Collins’ predecessor, Paul Johnson, earned in 2018. It would be handsome compensation for someone with two years of head-coaching experience, as Collins does.
What Collins does have, though, is something that few FBS coaches have in their first deal with a school – a seven-year term. The other six power-conference hires in this hiring cycle (as of Monday) were reported to have received either five- or six-year contracts. Of the other 13 current ACC coaches, the 10 whose initial contract lengths could be found online all started with contracts of either five or six years. Last year, Jimbo Fisher and Scott Frost were hired at Texas A&M and Nebraska, respectively, with 10- and seven-year deals with salaries that likely blow Collins’ out of the water.
Stansbury told the AJC that he did it because of his belief that shifting the offense and its personnel away from Johnson’s option offense will take time. Tech’s roster, for instance, has 16 running backs (including walk-ons) and no tight ends. (Johnson’s offense doesn’t use a tight end.) By comparison, the Temple roster that Collins assembled for the past two seasons has eight running backs and fullbacks and seven tight ends. A seven-year deal shows Stansbury’s commitment to invest in Collins for the long term.
“So that’s something I talked to (school president G.P. “Bud” Peterson) about early on, was I really felt like we needed to give the new head coach a seven-year contract, knowing that it was going to take a couple of years really to probably transition to whatever systems that they were ultimately going to want to run,” Stansbury said.
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