Bill Belichick No Longer the Best Paid Coach in Football

Image Via Keith Allison on Flickr

For the first time in three years, Bill Belichick is not the NFL’s highest paid coach, having been replaced by Sean Payton, of New Orleans Saints, according to Forbes Magazine’s annual ranking. Belichick must suffer the penury of being only the second highest paid professional coach in the league (and the nation.) Oh woe!

The change comes after Payton signed a five year contract paying roughly $8 million annually. This after, on the one hand, leading the Saints to their first championship in 2010, and the other hand, taking a suspension for his role in that little incident in which his organization paid players to maim people on opposing teams.

Belichick, meanwhile, will take in about $7.5 million annually, according to Forbes, which doesn’t disclose how it reports out the numbers. He’s not the only local coach to make Forbes’s list either. Only two non-football coaches broke the top 10 this year, and one of them was the Celtics’ own Doc Rivers, whose estimated $7 million base salary is enough to put him at number 6 on the list.

So there you go. Massachusetts remains a land that rewards its coaches better than almost any other … in the private sector, at least. For, as Deadspin calculated recently, we’re one of only a handful of states whose highest paid state employee is not a football coach.