INDIANAPOLIS — Large men in hats and jackets representing various NFL clubs sit around tables, eating lunch and drinking beer in groups of two, three or four. A man stood in front of the crowd, arms outstretched, counting on his fingers and gesticulating vigorously. Another person walked around the room handing out pens and paper. Then the man in front said something that prompted many of those gathered to raise their hands.
Black shadows are drawn facing the street. No one passing by could see anything. In the bustling restaurant, curious onlookers stretched their necks to look out through the glass windows, but could not hear the heated conversation going on in the private room.
“I thought it was a bunch of Boy Scouts,” said a visitor to the town attending a college swimming meet. Another outsider at the table turned his chair to get a better look and caught a glimpse of the credentials of a nearby reporter. “Do you know what happened in there?”
These guys are NFL coaches. More precisely, the coaching position. Offensive line coach, to be exact. The papers constitute the secret, unofficial annual salary survey of these independent organizations of coaches.
Unlike NFL player contracts, NFL coaching contracts are not public information. In college football, salary information for employees at public universities is public record, but that transparency does not apply to the NFL because each club is a private enterprise. Surveys like the one organized by the offensive line coaches are replicated by other position group coaches around the league, providing them with information they can’t get elsewhere.
An NFL running backs coach said: “This survey is so that I can understand my salary level and then have this information when negotiating.” “General managers and owners have this information, but we as coaches do not. I Meaning, you know what players are going to do and players know what other players are going to do.”
NFL coaches are management, but position coaches are middle managers. Some have agents to handle contracts, but many negotiate on their own. Unlike player contracts, there is no salary cap for the coaching staff.
When Frank Reich was hired in Carolina last winter, he said he recommended the exact staff he wanted to Panthers owner David Tepper, and Tepper Tepper) is willing to spend money to hire these coaches. “We were able to compete against other teams vying for similar candidates, and we stood out because of this support,” Reich said.
The Panthers’ staff won’t even last a full season, but in a league designed to create equality, paying coaches is a potential way to gain a competitive edge.
“There are teams that don’t pay a lot and they’re not shy about it,” the running backs coach said. “That’s exactly what they believe.”
Each coach surveyed in a private room at an Indianapolis restaurant was given two pieces of paper: one with their job title (without individual or team identifiers), years of experience and the years 2024, 2025 and 2026 salary information; one to write down their position (without individual or team identifiers), years of experience, and salary information for 2024, 2025, and 2026; and another to write down their personal contact information to receive results later. The two-page approach gives the coaches involved in the game reasonable deniability.
One offensive line coach said the salary survey process wasn’t always so secretive, but that has changed in recent years. Another front-line coach said that when he negotiates a contract, teams usually instruct him not to announce his salary, so other coaches don’t know how much he makes. Competitor The coaches cited in this article were granted anonymity to prevent potential retaliation.
“If owners don’t have to tell you how much everyone is being paid, they’re not going to do it because they want to keep wages low,” said Larry Kennan (right), former executive director of the NFL Coaches Association. (Gary Reyes/Getty Images)
The offensive line coach organizing this year’s meeting worried that reporters’ presence might scare others. Participation has become increasingly difficult as some teams choose not to send their coaching staff to Indianapolis. Last year, about half of the league’s offensive line coaches participated in the survey. The coach who organized the survey in the early 2000s said he would get an 80 to 85 percent participation rate.
Most position group coaches host an annual combine gathering. The only position group that doesn’t exchange salary information is quarterbacks coach, possibly because that job is viewed as an offensive coordinator or head coaching role rather than a mid-level stop in the professional ranks.
Last year, according to the Offensive Line Coaches Salary Survey, the salary difference between coaches with five years or less experience was $1.1 million. The highest-paid coaches with 1-5 years of experience reported higher salaries in 2023 than all but one offensive line coach with 6-10 years of experience. One coach in that group reported that his 2023 salary is higher than the highest-paid coach in the next group of veterans (11-15 years of experience).
This information is useful when negotiating a raise.
“Coaches should understand the market,” the running backs coach said. “Effectively, there are 32 separate entities that can keep their information wherever they wish.”
One offensive line coach, who does not have an agent, said teams sometimes dispute the numbers coaches report in salary surveys.
“It’s going to be controversial,” said one former offensive line coach, who said he hired an agent after the discrepancy between the NFL’s numbers and his coach’s numbers became too great. “Because you’re talking about money, it becomes hostile.”
The story goes that in the late 1990s, during a coaching reception at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, a veteran assistant coach climbed up the ballroom ladder. He blew his whistle to announce the news.
Hello everyone! We are forming the NFL Coaches Association.
In 1999, the NFLCA appointed Larry Kennan as its first executive director. Kennan has coached six teams in the NFL since 1982, serving as quarterbacks coach, wide receivers coach and offensive coordinator. He resigned from his last NFL job after the 1997 season when the Patriots demoted him from offensive coordinator.
At the urging of his peers, the self-proclaimed “spoiler” became the NFLCA’s first leader. “I knew I would probably never coach in the NFL again,” Kenan said. “Because yes, it’s going to piss off the owners.”
He is right.
“The owners, many of them, stood up and said, ‘If any of you coaches join this association and waive the salary survey, we’re going to fire you,'” Kennan said. “It was really hard to watch for a while.”
Early in Kenan’s NFL coaching career, he was offered a job by another team. He said he was afraid to negotiate for more money until his father gave him some advice.
“He said, ‘Just stop there. If you don’t ask for more money, you don’t value yourself, and the minute you ask for more money, you value yourself. Everybody does that. Respect that,” Kennan said.
Helping coaches determine their own value became his mission at the NFLCA.
“In any industry you’re in, if the bosses don’t have to tell you how much everyone makes, they’re not going to do it because they want to keep wages low,” Kennan said. “In business, lying is part of business.”
Kenan said Bengals owner Mike Brown and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones were initially adamantly opposed to the NFLCA and the idea of a salary investigation. Kennan met with the two men and spoke to them about the value of coaching, but the Bengals coaches never turned in their paychecks.
“Mike was just a very cautious guy and he didn’t want a lot of people to know what the Bengals were doing,” Kenan said.
Dennis Cordell, a coaching agent who worked for Kenan at the NFLCA, said that in its heyday in the early 2000s, about 90 percent of coaches who participated in salary surveys included coordinator-level information, not just is a message from a position coach.
The NFLCA fights for better retirement benefits and health insurance for its constituents and receives financial support from the NFLPA to maintain an office within the union’s headquarters in Washington, DC. Coaches pay $2,000 a year to become dues-paying members (about 40 percent do, Kenan said). But the NFLCA was once just a trade association and never became a formal union itself — coaches were at different levels of management, they needed to make complex arguments to the National Labor Relations Board, and there was too much bigotry among the membership anyway.
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Kennan left the NFLCA in 2011, and under different leadership, the organization feuded with the NFLPA and eventually ceased operations. The last thing left of the NFLCA are these annual position group meetings, and the group with the longest history of unity is the offensive line.
“He’s the type of offensive line coach who’s more willing than a lot of coaches to be there for everybody,” Kennan said.
Offensive line coaches are often among the highest-paid position coaches, in part because they operate like pseudo-coordinators. Longtime offensive line guru Howard Mudd is considered one of the best coaches the position has ever had and was the original leader of the organization’s O-line coaching staff.
According to Kennan, Mulder, who died in 2020, was the first coach to use a salary survey in contract negotiations. When Mulder was with the Colts, he used the numbers to get paid tens of thousands more than what Indianapolis initially offered him, which helped convince other coaches of the value of participating in the investigation.
“There’s only one reason coaches’ salaries go up because we were willing to share information,” the former offensive line coach said. “It’s surprising how quickly wages are rising.”
Before this year, the annual offensive line coaches meeting was held at the Indiana Convention Center, and in a room at the convention center was one of many companies that rented space to NFL teams to market their football products during the scouting combine. A product advertising banner at the door is a great cover for what else is going on inside.
This year, the convention center notified the company that a room it had rented for the past 15 or so years — located in a prime location on the building’s main thoroughfare — would no longer be available. The NFL needs space. The company chose not to participate in the combine due to the lack of prime real estate. That’s why coaches meet in the dining room during combine weeks.
The actual salary survey is only a small part of this year’s conference, the rest is socializing and money lessons from the money management firms that pay for private and buffet sessions. The meeting lasted an hour and a half, and after the financial talk was over and the salary survey was collected, several coaches picked up their bags and returned to the hotel. Most stayed until the afternoon, exchanging stories and drinking beers.
When the winter sun faded, they pushed the small tables together into one large table.
(Photo: Dan Goldfarb/ Competitor; Photo: Maddie Malhotra, Mark Brown, Nic Antaya / Getty Images)
