Non-Scholarship School Pays Football Coach $250,000 a Year

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Jacksonville University in Florida began a non-scholarship football program in 1998. I worked at the school that year and the sport was added because they wanted the minor boost in enrollment that would come from the players attending -- JU is an expensive private school that had only 3,000 students (3,700 today).

JU played its games on a field surrounded by a raised grass berm with no seats. It was as low budget as college football could possibly be, and even today there's only a small number of bleachers built into the berm, as you can see on Google Maps:

Link

The school is now discussing whether to become a scholarship football program. A local news story had this amazing fact about current coach Kerwin Bell:

... with Bell’s contract issue still in limbo, after months of speculation that JU might be looking to reduce a salary package believed to be worth about $250,000 per year, Dolphins’ players and coaches are concerned about the program’s direction.

I've never heard of a non-scholarship football team paying a coach this much. There are FCS head coaches who make considerably less than this. Todd Dodge's base salary at UNT was $180,000.