By: Jason Anastasopoulos 

Want to know if your favorite college basketball team will be able to compete in the Final Four next year? Just look at the coach’s salary. According to a recent analysis conducted at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, coach salaries were found to be an excellent predictor of 2008 tournament entry. 
Division I coach salary data from 2006 was used to predict whether teams were more likely to be in the 2008 tournament and the results were startling: coach salaries and the chances of entering the NCAA tournament are significantly related (see Methodology section for more details). As a coach’s salary increases, the chances of being chosen during Selection Sunday for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament leading up to the Final Four also increases.

According to the results, a team with a coach making $100,000 has about a 40% chance of making it to the NCAA tournament while a team whose coach makes $1,000,000 has about a 59% chance of making it to the NCAA tournament. Bump that up that to $1.5 million and that probability increases to 71%. For each extra $100,000 dollars that a coach is paid, the chances of being a contender in the NCAA tournament increases by 2.5%. 
These results suggest that teams whose coaches make slightly above $600,000 will have a greater than 50% chance of being selected to compete in the 2009 NCAA tournament while those teams whose coaches make less than $600,000 will have a less than 50% chance of being chosen. 
      
The top ten highest paid NCAA coaches in 2006 are listed below:

Of these 10 only two (Ohio State and Florida) were not chosen on Selection Sunday to compete in the 2008 NCAA tournament. In 2007, UConn’s Jim Calhoun was found to be the NCAA’s most overpaid coach and Winthrop’s Gregg Marshall ($224,257) to be the most underpaid. Click on the link for more information about the 2007 NCAA Basketball Coach Check.

For more on the NCAA Basketball selection process go to Wikipedia. 
For coach salary data go to USA Today.