49ers will pay Jim Tomsula almost $15 million for one season of work
Jim Tomsula will be leaving the Bay Area with some serious money in his bank account.
By
John Breech
•
1 min read
Jim Tomsula was fired this week after just one season as 49ers head coach. However, you definitely shouldn't feel sorry for him, because Tomsula will be leaving Bay Area with almost $15 million in his pocket.
When the 49ers promoted Tomsula from defensive line coach to head coach last January, they gave him a four-year, $14 million contract, which at the time, wasn't anything to brag about: At $3.5 million per season, Tomsula was the NFL's lowest paid coach.
However, Tomsula can start bragging now, because now that he's been fired, his four-year deal turns into a one-year deal worth $14 million, and San Francisco is on the hook for all of it. Tomsula was paid $3.5 million in 2015, so he still has $10.5 million coming his way.
During his press conference on Monday, 49ers CEO Jed York confirmed that the team would be paying Tomsula every dollar he's owed.
"I would say this; we've got several years of Jimmy T's salary left and we're going to eat it," York said. "Whether he's coaching somewhere else or not, we owe him that."
That second sentence is probably the one that's hard for York to swallow. Most coaching contracts include an offset clause, which means that if the coach gets hired somewhere else, the team that got rid of him wouldn't have to pay his salary.
If Tomsula's contract had an offset and he got a new coaching job that paid him $1 million per year, that would be $1 million less that the 49ers would have to pay him. However, as York mentioned, there's no offset, and the 49ers owe Tomsula the money "whether he's coaching somewhere else or not."
That means Tomsula will make $14 million for his services in 2015, which is more than Broncos coach Gary Kubiak ($5 million), Bengals coach Marvin Lewis ($4.5 million) and Panthers coach Ron Rivera ($4 million) will make combined for the 2015 season ($13.5 million).
Tomsula will also leave San Francisco knowing he made a healthy $2.8 million per victory during his one-year stay. To put that in perspective, Jim Harbaugh was paid about $455,000 per regular-season win during his four-year stint with the 49ers.
