John Thompson III’s salary is higher than we thought

Georgetown University paid John Thompson III a salary of over $3.6 million, according to the university’s most recent publicly available financial data. The data, a 990 form filed with the IRS from 2014 made public due to Georgetown’s status as a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, indicates that Thompson received a total of $3,671,620 from Georgetown in 2014.

Thompson’s salary had previously been reported at $2.8 million per year, but those numbers, made public two years ago, come from Georgetown’s 2012 financials. The new disclosures suggest that the University either gave Thompson annual raises or backloaded his contract.

The report, made available via the Economic Research Institute, lists the compensation of several of the university’s highest-paid employees. You can read the report in its entirety here, but the listing for Thompson is below. It lists him as receiving $3,624,303 in reportable compensation and $47,317 in “other compensation.”

Another disclosure later in the report breaks down Thompson’s salary in more detail. Thompson’s base compensation is listed at $1,348,158, with $2,251,904 as “other reported compensation,” plus several smaller bonuses that add up to a total salary of $3,671,620. This implies that for unknown bookkeeping reasons, the majority of Thompson’s salary comes from beyond his base compensation.

Financial disclosures dating back to 2008 include Thompson’s salary, providing evidence that the University gave Thompson year-over-year raises for every year since 2008. Thompson’s salary went from $1.8 million in 2008, to just under $1.9 million in 2009, to $2.2 million in 2010, to $2.6 million in 2011, to $2.8 million in 2012, to $3.1 million in 2013, and to over $3.6 million in 2014. It will be at least two to three years before data from 2016 and 2017 is made available, making it impossible to know for sure whether Georgetown has given Thompson a raise since 2014.

Thompson’s $3.6 million salary makes him the highest-paid employee Georgetown listed on its forms and likely places him as one of the ten highest-paid NCAA Division I men’s basketball coaches.

According to USA Today’s reporting on coach salaries, of the 68 coaches in last season’s NCAA Tournament, only five received more total pay than Thompson. (Those five are Mike Krzyzewski, John Calipari, Sean Miller, Bill Self, and Tom Izzo.) Coaches who received less compensation than Thompson from their respective universities include Roy Williams of North Carolina, Mark Few of Gonzaga, and Jay Wright of Villanova, who was paid over $1 million less than Thompson in the season he led the Wildcats to a National Championship.

All eight of Thompson’s Division I peers mentioned above have coached their teams to NCAA Tournament appearances four years in a row, and each of them has at least one Elite Eight appearance in that span. Thompson’s Hoyas have missed the NCAA Tournament in three of the last four seasons and have not advanced past the Round of 32 in a decade.

(Full disclosure: the author of this article is one of the organizers of Students Concerned for Georgetown Basketball, an organization which submitted a petition asking Georgetown University to consider replacing Thompson earlier this month.)