In college basketball, great coaching can mean the difference between great success and massive failure. Where would Michigan State be this year if not for Tom Izzo? Or Wichita State with Gregg Marshall? VCU with Shaka Smart? Many of the teams in this year’s NCAA Tournament need to make the investment in order to keep their coaches around for the long term. Some are successful; others, like VCU, are not.

The state of Illinois college basketball is in flux, with the U of I currently in a prolonged malaise caused by years of disrepair, Northwestern still not in tournament position, and Bradley and ISU going in opposite directions.

Money in college basketball talks, and many of the schools outside of Illinois can afford to pay the big bucks. It isn’t that Illinois isn’t necessarily incapable of paying coaches big money, it’s just that schools are a little bit more thrifty here than in other places.

We wanted to figure out how schools in Illinois were paying their coaches, how their pay had increased or decreased over time compared to some of the elite coaches in the industry. The results were rather interesting.

Some notable figures:

• Illinois head coach John Groce, unsurprisingly, has the highest salary amongst state coaches. Groce received a $300,000 bonus following the 2013-14 season and is now being paid $1.7 million.
• Illinois State head coach Dan Muller was paid considerably less than Groce, being paid some $401,200 for his efforts. Expect that to rise now that he has a NCAA Tournament-caliber team in Normal.
• Geno Ford’s salary is hard to pinpoint, mostly due to Bradley’s status as an private institution. His salary fluctuated over the past year. After his firing, Ford made over $720,765 for his final season, a cut of about 4 percentage points.
• His replacement, Brian Wardle, took a 12% pay raise after the 2012-2013 season. His salary at Bradley is unknown.
• Nationally, John Calipari is the highest paid coach in college basketball among coaches who made the NCAA Tournament. Calipari signed a massive $50 million contract extension and is currently being paid more than $6 million per year.
• Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski actually took a 60% pay cut after being paid more than $9 million. This number is the most noticeable outlier amongst all of the numbers on the list; most increases and decreases were within 15-20%.

Information for the article was provided by: USA Today, Illinoishomepage.net, NC State University, the Illinois News Network, The Southern, and the Evansville Courier-Press.