Iowa State Coach Helping Cover Staff Salary Cuts

Another reason to believe Matt Campbell was the right man for the job as Iowa State football coach.

Beyond continued success on the field, he continues to show his leadership off it. He declines to take coaching offers from other schools, despite being a candidate for almost every single opening every year. It's a $6 million buyout if he jumps ship.

The Des Moines Register reports now that he will cover some of the lost wages his coaching staff took due to COVID-19 cuts.

Campbell himself took a 10 percent pay cut, to go in effect from July 1, 2020 to June 20, 2021. He is having his $3.5 million annual salary cut by $497,124 this year and that's before he agreed to take another $147,000 off to give back to his assistants to defray their losses.

His salary reduction will trickle down to benefit an unknown number of his assistants whose cuts were taken to make up for the loss of revenue in other sports and programs at ISU. It was all to make up for a loss in revenue from the canceled Big 12 and NCAA basketball tournaments.

Make no mistake, coaches and other sports figures are still better off than most of us financially even when they take temporary pay cuts, but we can feel good about who we have running these programs knowing they are willing to "take one for the team".