At Built on Facts, Matt Springer points to a cartoon from PhD Comics that graphs mean salaries at US universities. Presidents and provosts make around three times as much as tenured professors, and he thinks this is unfair since profs have to juggle both administrative work and research. Grad students scrape by on about $18,000 per year. By comparison, football coaches pull in a staggering $1 million average annual salary. "Football is popular.