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Professional football is the most lucrative coaching field, according to Forbes, which has released its top 10 list of highest-paid coaches in sports.

Bill Belichick tops the list for the second year in a row following the retirement of Phil Jackson, the only coach to have ever made an eight-figure salary. Belichick is believed to make $7.5 million per year. Doc Rivers is the highest-paid NBA coach at $7 million.

Sean Payton would have made the list at $7 million if not for his suspension.

No Major League Baseball or National Hockey League coach made the list. The highest-paid MLB coach is the Los Angeles Angels’ Mike Scioscia, whose 10-year, $50 million contract gives him an average salary of $5 million per year. Forbes has never reported on the highest-paid NHL coaches.

NFL and NBA head-coaching salaries are driven in part by escalating college coaching salaries. A college head coach’s salary is more complicated to compute than a professional coach’s, because pay can come from a variety of sources, from the university to athletic foundations to shoe and apparel companies. Experts say only approximately 25 percent of a head coach’s salary is paid directly by the university.

According to information compiled by USA Today, the average college football coach at a public university made $2.1 million in 2011. Texas’ Mack Brown led the list at $5.2 million, but Alabama’s Nick Saban will become the highest-paid college football coach in 2012 with a salary of $5.3 million.

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Danica Patrick had a disappointing NASCAR Sprint Cup race debut at Daytona, finishing 38th. She hasn’t won a Nationwide Series event in 33 tries, with only one top-5 finish. And she didn’t exactly tear up the IndyCar Series, either, with one victory in 115 races.

Even so, she continues to be an extremely powerful marketing personality, trailing only legendary drivers Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and John Force in the name-recognition metric known as the Q Score.

That helps explain Thursday’s announcement that she would become the first female member of the Coca-Cola Racing Family. She also became the first member of that group to be associated with a sole brand: Coke Zero.

According to the Q Score Company, 76 percent of people in its annual poll were familiar with Patrick, much higher than the 48 percent average for all active and retired race car drivers. The figure is also a solid increase from the 69 percent of people who were familiar with her in last year’s poll.

Enough of those people ranked her as one of their favorites to earn her a positive Q Score of 19, again much higher than the average for all active and retired drivers, which is 13. Last year, her Q Score was even higher at 22, but the president of the Q Score Company, Henry Schafer, said that should not be much of a concern.

“Her growth in familiarity outpaced her appeal,” said Schafer, “hence the slightly lower Q Score this year. This is not a significant drop and still keeps her positive Q Score above average.”

Patrick also rates high among women athletes with at least a 40 percent awareness, behind only Shawn Johnson, Anna Kournikova, Kristi Yamaguchi, Peggy Fleming and Maria Sharapova.

Patrick has one thing those women don’t have, however: She’s part of a sport where fans are fiercely brand-loyal. According to a study by Taylor, 61 percent of NASCAR fans from ages 18 to 35 will buy a sponsor’s product if it is the same price as a competitor’s product. Fourteen percent would buy the sponsor’s product even if it were more expensive.

The combination of Patrick’s appeal and her being part of a sport in which fans in a key demographic are brand-loyal makes her a marketer’s dream.

“She’s an extremely appealing figure for Coke Zero because she basically represents everything the brand does,” said Sharon Byers, Coca-Cola’s senior vice president for sports and entertainment. “It’s one of our biggest growing brands. Her appeal to young adult men is the exact consumer base that we want to connect.”

Patrick, who will race in her second Sprint Cup Series race this weekend at the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway, has already proved to be a successful spokeswoman in her well-known endorsement deal with GoDaddy.com. The Web domain registration company reported that within 15 minutes of its first Patrick ad during the 2011 Super Bowl, domain registrations jumped 466 percent over the previous year. This year, the company set a Sunday sales record and also broke its one-day mark for mobile website traffic following the airing of two Super Bowl commercials featuring Patrick.

Patrick’s other endorsement deals include Nationwide Insurance, Tissot, Chevrolet, Peak Antifreeze, William Rast clothing and Hot Wheels.

The Atlantic Coast Conference’s television contract extension with ESPN, announced Wednesday, is the first of three major conference deals expected to be finalized in the next few months.

The ACC contract was extended after the addition of new members Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh last September. The shifting of schools as part of conference realignment also led to changes in the Big 12 and Southeastern Conference that has those existing deals in play, too.

The ACC deal is worth $3.6 billion over the next 15 years, according to The Associated Press. That puts the ACC behind only the Big Ten and Pac-12 in terms of the average revenue per school, per year by one measure (viewing all current contracts divided between conferences’ 2012-13 membership.)

SportsBusiness Daily has reported the Big 12 has verbally agreed to a new contract with ESPN and FOX for its first-tier rights for $2.6 billion over 13 years. That would bring the per-year average for the Big 12 to $200 million and the per-school, per-year average to $20 million. The SEC is expected to reopen its contract talks with ESPN following the addition of Missouri and Texas A&M.

ESPN had no comment on any of the deals, which vary in what slate of rights are included, but a spokesman did say that the network is in regular contact with its business partners.

With all of the shuffling and extensions, it can be hard to keep up. Here’s a listing, according to information from The Associated Press, SportsBusiness Daily, SportsBusiness Journal and Adweek, of where things stand now. The Big 12 extension is not included because it has not been finalized. Also, per-year averages and per-school, per-year averages are straight averages and do not take into account actual variances by year as stipulated in individual contracts.

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Bryce Harper burst onto the scene in Washington, D.C., batting .300 in his first nine games as a major leaguer, with six doubles and three RBIs. So far, he’s everything Nationals fans hoped he would be. Living up to those high expectations on a team tied for the division lead should make him a marketer’s dream … one day.

“Because baseball is such a regional sport, it’s difficult to become a national household name without postseason exposure and World Series rings,” said Bob Dorfman, executive vice president and executive creative director at Baker Street Advertising. “It doesn’t happen overnight -- even when you’re the game’s biggest phenom.”

That being said, Dorfman sees a lot of potential for Harper, who does have an endorsement deal with Under Armour. “The league certainly needs a new star to fill Derek Jeter’s shoes as the game’s No. 1 pitchman, and Harper has all the tools to do it: youth, talent, looks, charisma and interesting hair.”

However, Dorfman says being in the New York media spotlight and having numerous opportunities to play into October helped propel Jeter into baseball’s poster boy.

“Harper has Washington, D.C., a football town first, without an MLB club for so long that most of its baseball fans have turned to the [Baltimore] Orioles and the allure of Camden Yards,” Dorfman said. “The lack of any Nationals’ attendance boost from Harper, Stephen Strasburg and being in first place seems to bear this out.”

Harper’s home debut in Washington last week drew 22,675 fans to the 41,000-seat Nationals Park. The following night, Harper had three hits in the Nationals' win over Arizona, which only 16,274 fans saw. Although attendance that evening was believed to be affected by the Washington Capitals hosting a playoff game just down the street, the Nationals have struggled with attendance ever since Nationals Park opened.

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David Wells is a Babe Ruth fan. Big time. So why is the former pitcher auctioning his 1930s Ruth/New York Yankees hat (an auction that ends May 19)? Boomer joins Michele Steele to explain.

This is the third in a three-part series based on an ESPN the Magazine feature. The full feature is available in the Mag's Money Issue.

Lesson seven: The NFL's new rookie pay scale is a game changer
NFL owners took a PR hit during last year’s lockout, but fans should be glad that the suits stuck to their guns on one key demand. The new rookie salary scale should introduce a more sensible financial structure, with the biggest NFL deals based on performance, not potential. In the 2010 draft, top pick Sam Bradford got a six-year, $78 million deal from the Rams. Last year, though, Panthers rookie QB Cam Newton received only a four-year, $22 million deal. “Newton is a very good young quarterback,” says Vikings GM Rick Spielman, “but if he had been a bust, his contract is nowhere near the competitive disadvantage that it would have been.”

Wharton believes the new model could help establish a relationship between spending and success in the NFL, as the worst franchises will no longer be forced to pay exorbitant amounts on high draft picks, freeing up money to pay proven veterans.

Lesson eight: The NBA has two huge market inefficiencies
An anonymous GM sums up one of Wharton’s points perfectly: “The only two ways to create an edge is by having either maximum-salary players worth more than their contracts or guys outperforming their rookie deals.”

LeBron James will make just more than $16 million this season, less than Carmelo Anthony, Joe Johnson or Gilbert Arenas. But underpaying a star veteran might not be as big a bargain as locking up a marquee rookie.
In 2008, the Bulls signed Derrick Rose to a four-year, $22.5 million deal. Last season, under his rookie contract, Rose won the MVP award but made $11.1 million less than runner-up Dwight Howard. That difference is just shy of the $11.3 million that the Bulls paid star forward Luol Deng last season.

Lesson nine: The Garden is rotten
Jim Dolan, Cablevision honcho and owner of the Knicks and Rangers, has made a big impact on the NBA and NHL. But not in the way New Yorkers had hoped. If not for his teams, there would be much stronger correlations between spending and winning in both leagues. In the past 10 NBA seasons, a team in the upper quartile in spending finished in the bottom half of the league standings just 26 times. Nine of those were Knicks squads. During the past 10 NHL seasons, just 15 upper-quartile spenders had below-average seasons. The Rangers accounted for six of them.

The only fact more staggering than one owner accounting for so much futility? The Rangers and the Knicks are both in the playoffs this year. Let’s hear it for long-term plans!

More than 160,000 fans are expected to crowd into Churchill Downs on Saturday to watch the “fastest two minutes in sports.”

Ticket demand for the Kentucky Derby has surpassed all prior years, according to ticket reseller StubHub. More than 3,000 fans purchased tickets online, though prices have been about 10 percent lower than last year. Twenty-four hours before the Derby, the get-in price on StubHub was $245 for lower grandstand seats at the 3/16 pole. The most expensive seat was $4,706 each for seats in the Turf Club.

Unlimited standing-room only tickets are available at Churchill Downs on race day for $50, a $10 increase over last year’s price. For those who purchased in advance, the cheapest seats were in the bleachers starting at $100. Millionaire’s Row, where many celebrities take in the action, is sold by the table for about $5,000, but that price can move higher depending on the package bought.

A further look inside some of the numbers that make the Derby the huge event that it is, according to the Derby:

The Money
•  $165.2 million: total amount waged on Kentucky Derby Day in 2011.
•  $135.5 million: amount paid to winning bettors in 2011.
•  $184.90: the record $2 win payoff for a Kentucky Derby winner (Donerail, 1913)

The Alcohol
•  120,000: the number of $10 Mint Juleps sold.
•  40,000: the number of $10 Oaks Lilies sold.
•  425,000: cans of $7 and $8 beer sold.

The People
•  164,858: the record number of people who attended last year’s race.
•  44: Kentucky Derby starters for trainer D. Wayne Lukas, the most in history. He’ll extend his record this weekend with Optimizer.

Getting a horse into the raise is, to put it mildly, an expensive effort.

All Derby horses are 3-year-olds. They all are born between January and June of a given year but all have the official birth date of Jan. 1.

The first step in raising a Derby contender is to either purchase a horse at auction or breed. Purchasing a thoroughbred at auction can range from the low-six figures to the low-seven figures. The record purchase price for an eventual Kentucky Derby winner was $4 million for then-yearling Fusaichi Pegasus, which won in 2000.

Horse owner Nelson Clemmens said breeding a horse requires the purchase of a good mare, which can range from $50,000 to $400,000 or more. The owner will then have to pay a stud fee, which ranges from $10,000 to $150,000.

Once a horse is weaned around 5 months old, Clemmens said it costs approximately $1,500 a month to develop. That cost escalates to $2,500 to $3,000 per month.

Once a thoroughbred is running at a high level, it costs $3,000 to $4,000 per month to train the horse, plus transportation, entry fees and other costs. There are also various administrative costs that go into preparing a horse for the Kentucky Derby.

When a horse wins a purse, which at the Kentucky Derby is worth $1.5 million for the winner, Clemmens said 60 percent goes to the owner, 10 percent to the trainer and 10 percent to the jockey. The remainder is used to pay grooms’ bonuses and other track expenses.

The odds are stacked against that big win. Each year, about 30,000 foals arrive in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. Only 20 end up racing in the Derby each year.

Our friends over at the "Outside the Lines" The File blog have an interesting post up this morning: The Kansas State athletic department was the nation's most profitable in 2010-11.

Hard to believe it topped powerhouses like Texas, Florida and LSU, but the documents don't lie. Take a look, and see where your favorite school landed in the complete database of D-I revenues and expenses.

This is the second in a three-part series from ESPN the Magazine's Money Issue.

Lesson four: Spending in the NHL actually matters MORE since the Lockout
NHL fans lost an entire season due to hard-line owners seeking a tight salary cap. So it’s shocking that since the empty 2004-05 season, payroll is linked even more with winning. Before the lockout, a 10% increase in spending was worth about 5.8 team points (roughly three wins) over a season. Since the lockout, that number has ballooned to 9.2 points. The Wharton researchers theorize that this counterintuitive trend is a result of the CBA’s producing a tighter range of spending between teams. “Each dollar became that much more valuable,” they concluded.

Hurricanes GM Jim Rutherford agrees: “Despite not having as big a gap, $16 million between the cap and the floor, teams that consistently spend at the top will still have an advantage in getting top players.” He also says low-payroll teams can succeed only for a short period. Nashville earned the Western Conference’s fourth seed this year with a slightly below-average payroll. But the team is winning on borrowed time. “The Predators are at that point where they’re either going
to spend toward the cap or risk losing top young players,” Rutherford says. “So from a consistency basis, you can see the advantage
for the teams that are able to routinely spend at the upper end.”

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This is the first of a three-part series from ESPN the Magazine's "Pay Dirt." The full feature is available in the current issue of The Mag's Money Issue.

It’s tough to follow the money in sports, so The Mag commissioned the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to discover the relationship between spending and winning in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and English Premier League. Six Wharton students and two professors spent 250 hours studying exactly how money is used to gain an edge in sports. They used a technique called regression analysis to estimate how changes in spending at certain on-field positions would positively or negatively impact how much a team won. The research probed how reallocating player salaries impact performance, whether that relationship changes from sport to sport and how teams can spend smarter than their competition. Armed with Wharton’s data, we learned nine important lessons.

Lesson one: Moneyball still works
Perhaps Wharton’s most surprising finding was that there was a smaller correlation between spending and winning in deep-pocketed baseball than in cap-bound hockey. While many teams have co-opted A’s GM Billy Beane’s Moneyball strategy, other market inefficiencies linger, like player development and pre-arbitration deal-making. “The Rays are a great model,” says one GM about the low-budget team that has averaged 92 wins the past four seasons. “It’s much more difficult to sustain success with a smaller payroll, but if you put the right parts together, you can have a three- to-five-year run.”

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The Los Angeles Dodgers officially belong to Guggenheim Baseball Management (and Magic Johnson). But did the buyers, who spent $2 billion, overpay? Marc Ganis, president of Sportscorp Ltd., joins Michele Steele to discuss.

Andrew Luck might be the top pick in the NFL draft, but Madison Avenue has its sights on the likely second pick, Robert Griffin III.

“When it comes down to marketability, it’s no contest,” said John Stone, director of business development at New England Consulting Group. “Luck is awkward in the way he speaks. RG3 is a rock star.

“[Griffin] is someone who we haven’t seen in a couple of decades. If you look at some [of] the most iconic marketing stars in the last decade -- [Derek] Jeter, [Peyton] Manning, [Michael] Jordan -- RG3 is ahead of them at the same age as far as charisma, overall dynamic personality, his ability to communicate, his authenticity and just being a refreshing personality. He has the potential to be as big a superstar as those athletes were in their sports.”

Luck has already signed deals with Panini America and Nike, while Griffin has racked up deals with Subway, Castrol Oil and adidas and is on the cover of EA Sports "NCAA Football 13."

Henry Schafer’s firm, The Q Score Company, polls sports fans to determine which athletes fans are most aware of and how they feel about those athletes. Griffin came out on top in the most recent survey, with an overall Q Score of 20, five points above the average for all NFL players. Half of all sports fans are at least familiar with him.

Luck is slightly more well-known, with 54 percent of fans saying they’re familiar with the former Stanford quarterback, but his Q Score comes in below Griffin’s at the NFL average of 15, meaning more sports fans identified Griffin as one of their favorites rather than Luck.

Both outscored last year’s top pick, Cam Newton. Prior to the draft, his Q Score was well below the league average at 11, with 42 percent of people who were aware of him holding a negative opinion. Tim Tebow, a first-round pick in 2010, had a Q Score just one point above Griffin’s going into the 2010 draft, in part because 28 percent of sports fans had a negative opinion of him.

Regardless of familiarity or likability, companies generally are willing to take a risk on the top one or two quarterbacks in the draft.

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Through the years, discussion of a college football playoff system has been full of unknowns. But this much is certain: should the BCS bowl system be chucked in favor of a playoff, a financial windfall will follow.

Economists and television consultants value a playoff system around $600 million to $1.5 billion per year, depending on the number of teams included. That’s a major increase from the more than $125 million per year the BCS currently receives annually from its contract with ESPN for the national championship, Fiesta Bowl, Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl. The Rose Bowl’s contract with ABC generates another $30 million per year.

Neil Pilson, former president of CBS Sports, said competition between networks to carry a college football playoff will lead to a big pay day, because airing playoff games would provide new business opportunities for networks in addition to showcasing a long-awaited event.

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The seat in Section U of the Skyline Deck at Target Field is high above the left-field line and provides a panoramic view of the Minneapolis skyline.

From Seat 1 in Row 5, a Twins fan can watch Joe Mauer rip line drives on the diamond below or gaze into the distance at the downtown highrises.

What’s the price to sit there?

That’s where it gets complicated.

The face value for a ticket in the Skyline Deck section, bought before the season, ranges from $29 to $37, depending on the date and opponent.

But consider: Over a 10-game span in late April and early May, with the Twins hosting the Red Sox, Royals, Angels and Blue Jays, single-game prices to sit in that seat are $27 for the first game, go to $30, drop back to $27, plummet to $19 for three straight dates, climb back to $22, rise to $23 for two games and then finish at $31.

This is what’s known in the industry as dynamic pricing, and if it hasn’t come to a ballpark near you yet, it will.

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It’s hard to believe, with all the celebrations surrounding Fenway Park’s 100th year, that a mere 10 years ago many people were talking about tearing down the ballpark. The thinking was that the new Boston Red Sox owners would need a modern stadium to generate the kind of money that would make buying the team a smart business move.

Yet Fenway was saved from the wrecking ball and modernized by a $285 million, 10-year renovation that also added 3,500 seats. The modernization kept the park’s historic bones, though, so much so that last month, Fenway was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Lest anyone think that’s merely a feel-good honor, the designation means millions of dollars -- about $40 million -- to the Red Sox organization. The designation makes the Red Sox eligible for federal tax credits equal to 20 percent of certain funds spent on the stadium preservation and renovations -- even though they occurred over the past 10 years. The team was already eligible for a 20 percent state tax credit, worth another $40 million, $11 million of which it received during the course of renovations. Future renovations also could receive tax credits.

The ownership consortium led by John Henry has made out extremely well on its investment in 2002. In '02, Forbes estimated the team’s value at $426 million. Today? It’s worth an estimated $1 billion.

Many teams have seen such increases due to lucrative local television deals and co-owned networks, like the Red Sox’s NESN. But the Sox's growth is more pronounced when considering revenues and operating income, which includes categories like ticket and sponsorship income. In 2002, Forbes estimated such revenue at $152 million; today, it’s $310 million. Operating income no longer has the team in the red. In 2002, the team lost an estimated $11.4 million. In its latest valuations, Forbes lists operating income for the Red Sox at $25.4 million, good enough for seventh in Major League Baseball.

The National Register of Historic Places designation does carry some restrictions for the team; any work done to the park in the future must be reviewed to determine its effect on the historic nature of the park. But the designation doesn’t carry the heavier restrictions of national landmark status.

Wrigley Field is eligible for such a designation, but team owners have not pursued it.

Unlike the Red Sox, the Cubs have said they have been hamstrung by Wrigley’s local landmark status. For example, while the Red Sox were able to increase revenue by placing signage on the Green Monster in recent years, Wrigley’s ivy-covered walls and center-field scoreboard are protected in a way that prohibits advertising. The team estimates it loses about $30 million a year as a result.

Although the Red Sox do not have local landmark status, the team did submit all renovation plans to the Boston Landmarks Commission for review.