True enough- it’s a judgment call. But one of the tests for reasonableness is a comparable private sector for-profit job. The comparable private sector job is the NFL Head Coach. We are assuming the profession is “head coaching” overall and not just college head coaching. Comparing one nonprofit head coach to another nonprofit head coach (like saying Michigan pays X amount, therefore Alabama can pay X amount) doesn’t make a lot of sense because the nonprofit head coach pay scale runs from a few hundred thousand for the head coach at the Little Sisters of the Blind University all the way to Alabama, whereas all NFL Head Coaches in the for profit private sector are all basically within the $6-10 million range with comparable responsibilities across the board.
Saban, as a college head coach making $8.3 million, makes 2 million more than the lowest paid NFL Head Coach. That’s just Saban’s salary alone. When you add in the free house and other paid for expenses, he could easily be making about $11 million per year total compensation. That is almost twice as much as a private sector NFL coach. So let’s look at responsibilities- every college coach that jumped to the NFL, then moved back has stated that the work demands in the “Not For Long” league far exceed that of a college coach. Spurrier, a national championship winning college coach, was notorious for his easy going schedule and having tee times built into his college “work schedule.” He couldn’t handle the works hours demanded by the NFL (I think Gruden said a NFL head coach gets about 4 hours a sleep per night during the season). You could even go so far as to say that a head coach at a small university without Alabama's resources has a FAR, FAR, FAR harder job than Saban, because he has to attempt to compete for a national championship without dozens of extra assistants and a massive financial and recruiting infrastructure behind him.
So how about coaching acumen? I guess you could argue that Saban is the GOAT college coach. But if you look at the comparable private sector, how does he fair against the private sector for-profit coaches? Well, wouldn’t you know, we can actually see how Saban stacked up in the NFL. He was a mediocre NFL head coach, who couldn’t handle the pressure of the NFL and fled back to college. So his coaching ability has been measured against his private sector counterparts and was shown to be average at best. So if the profession is head coaching, then I think Saban’s compensation is excessive for a non-profit employee.