How much do NFL head coaches make – including LA Rams McVay?

With all the recent talk and speculation about the NFL salary cap and teams restructuring players’ contracts to get under the cap (and the LA Rams‘ limited ability to sign free agents because of salary cap restrictions), I got to wondering about how much the LA Rams (and everybody else) pays their head coach.

Short answer?: LA Rams Sean Mcvay pulls down $8.5 million per year and he’s signed through 2022.

Another fun fact: NFL head coaches are the highest paid of any professional sport (at least in this country). Some European soccer coaches make more, but that’s across the pond, and who cares?

And while the league seems rather transparent about announcing how much its players make, the length of their contracts, and where the team stands against the cap, when it comes to finding out how many Benjamins they are shelling out for the coach, not so much. And the answers can be, um, murky. (or, at least open to conjecture and speculation).

That isn’t good enough. So let’s see if we can peel back that curtain a bit, by starting with what has been publicly disclosed, and then working toward an educated guess of what is unknown.

NFL coaches’ salaries do not count against the salary cap. The cap is just a limit on how much your team can spend on player salaries per season. Coaching salaries are taken out of NFL “shared revenues” given to your team and whatever other profits the team makes off parking, merchandise,  etc. Head coaches are part of the NFL overhead, a category of expenses that goes into the day-to-day operations of the team. But should a coach get fired, however, the organization has to pay the entire remaining contract.