Oklahoma football coach Lincoln Riley’s historic first year as head coach in Norman did not go unnoticed from the folks with power enough to enact a raise for him.

On Tuesday in Oklahoma City, University of Oklahoma Board of Regents approved a substantial raise for the 34-year-old wunderkind. Over the next five years, Riley will earn $25 million. This means he will be catapulted into the $5 million head coaches club a year after making $3.1 million.

Not insignificantly, though, Riley will earn $4.8 million in 2018. That’s a about $100,000 more than presumed OU starting quarterback Kyler Murray.

Murray inked a deal with the Oakland Athletics last week that will make him the highest paid college football player ever. Or, if you prefer, the highest paid minor league prospect the A’s signed this year.

However you want the optics to appear, Riley makes more than the star he coaches. Which is clearly what the regents and OU athletic director Joe Castiglione wanted to make fact.

“We all get compensated a lot better than any of us ever dreamed about when we decided to start coaching college football,” Riley told the Tulsa World. “That isn’t why we do it. With all the good that comes along with it, there’s a different kind of risk for you and your families and strain. There’s going to going to be compensation on the other end of it. That’s how the world works. Risk — the more high-profile these jobs are the more there is.”

In his first season, Riley coached a Heisman winner, set school and NCAA records for offense, won the conference crown and earned a berth to the College Football Playoff. No one believes he hasn’t earned his bump.

As a matter of fact, he’s making Arizona, Michigan and Texas look mighty silly by paying $6,031,563 to Rich Rodriguez, $7,04,000 to Jim Harbaugh and $5,486,316 to Tom Herman, respectively, in 2017.

Riley wasn’t the only coach to receive a raise. In fact, every Sooners on-field assistant did.

This includes defensive coordinator Mike Stoops who earned a $30,000 bump after a season where the team lost to Iowa State for the first time since 1990, ranked 101 in the defensive S&P+ and must shoulder the blame for losing the Rose Bowl. With bonuses, Stoops will earn more than $1 million and was extended through 2020.

The gap between the Sooners coaching staff and the coaching staffs they're chasing for championships remains wide. The Sooners 10 on-field assistants will earna combined $5,135,000 in 2018.

Seems like a lot until we look south to Alabama.

In 2017, Alabama assistants made $5,995,000. And there were only nine of them. According to the Tuscaloosa News, that number could approach $7 million by the end of the year.

And in college football, at least, those numbers matter. Just ask Nick Saban. He made more than $11 million in 2017—a little over $2 million for each of the five national titles he’s won in the last 10 years. 

Just when you think OU is catching up, you realize just how far behind the Sooners still are.

RJ Young is a former Oklahoma Sooners football and basketball beat writer, investigative journalist, essayist, novelist, and Ph.D student. His memoir "LET IT BANG" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) hits shelves and earbuds in October. His YouTube channel is fire if you're into storytelling and topics ranging from Baker Mayfield to The Rock's early wrestling career to this one time when a guy got a little too interested in RJ's "Black Panther" cup at a urinal inside of a movie theater.