At the top of their game

By: Dan StrumpfThe news: On Feb. 28, Chicago Bears head coach Lovie Smith signed a four-year contract extension worth $22 million.

Behind the news: Just as Smith and Tony Dungy became the first African- American head coaches in the National Football League to lead teams to the Super Bowl, they are also the first two black head coaches to rank among the 10 best paid in the league, a category that just five years ago included no African Americans.

Salaries for head coaches are notoriously difficult to pin down because teams are under no obligation to release the figures. But a survey of salaries culled from news sources shows that Smith is now the 10th highest- paid head coach in the NFL. He will average $4.7 million a year during the next five years. Before signing his contract extension, Smith was the league’s lowest-paid head coach.

In 2002, cbs.sportsline.com ranked the salaries of every head coach in the NFL. Dungy, the highest-paid of just two black head coaches that year, was ranked 14th overall at $2.6 million a year. Now, Dungy is earning $5 million a year, which ties him for the seventh-highest salary.

“To have a second-class salary makes you a secondclass citizen. But the actual presence of black coaches on the field is what people notice,” says Janice F. Madden, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied racial diversity among NFL coaches. She noted that there were seven black head coaches in the NFL last season—the most ever.