Missouri football coach Barry Odom gets two-year contract extension

Barry Odom has received a reward for leading his Missouri football team on a six-game winning streak and earning a bowl berth.

Odom and Mizzou have agreed to a two-year contract extension. The second-year head football coach’s contract now runs until Feb. 28, 2023.

All of the existing financial details of the contract Odom agreed to in 2015 remain the same, with one added incentive: In any season during the agreement that ticket revenue from Mizzou home football games exceeds $11.7 million, Odom will receive 20 percent of any additional revenue the program makes from ticket sales.

Odom, who replaced Gary Pinkel after the 2015 season, receives a base annual salary of $450,000. He also receives a guaranteed non-salary compensation of $1.9 million, which is made up of $475,000 payments for four things: radio appearances, television appearances, public relations appearances and apparel rights. He can make up to $1.525 million in incentive pay.

Odom is the lowest paid head football coach at any of the Southeastern Conference’s 13 public universities. Vanderbilt, a private university, does not have to publicly disclose information about coaches’ contracts, but Commodores coach Derek Mason reportedly makes more than $2.5 million in base salary.

Odom, 41, began this season with a 1-5 start, and he seemed to have little job security. But now Odom is just the first Mizzou coach to make a bowl game in his second year since Warren Powers did so in each of his first two seasons, 1978 and 1979. Missouri plays the Texas Longhorns in the Texas Bowl on Dec. 27 in Houston.

For coaching in that bowl game, Odom will receive a $50,000 incentive payment, and he can earn a $75,000 payment for winning it.

“Coach Odom has tremendous passion for Mizzou, and I look forward to watching him lead our football program for many years to come,” athletic director Jim Sterk said in a statement.

The extension means Odom can tell class of 2018 players he is currently recruiting that he will be under contract during the length of their college careers. Of course, schools can still fire their head coaches, and coaches can still leave their programs for other jobs, but head coaches often try to secure enough years on their contract so that opposing schools can’t use job security against them during recruiting.

If Mizzou decides to buy Odom out of the contract it will owe him the total of his annual salary times the number of years remaining on his contract, which — at most — totals to $2.25 million. If Odom terminates the contract on or before Feb. 28, 2019, he must pay MU $2.35 million.

“The stability that this will provide for us to continue to provide a foundation for our student-athletes to be successful for the next 50 years of their lives is important,” Odom said in a statement. “The leadership from Mr. Sterk and our administration is moving Mizzou forward in a great way, and I am certainly grateful for their support.”

The announcement of the contract extension comes one day after Odom found out his offensive line coach, Glen Elarbee, is joining the Tigers’ former offensive coordinator, Josh Heupel, at Central Florida. Heupel is becoming the head coach at UCF.

The memorandum of understanding regarding Odom's contract extension does not include any information about the salary pool available for Mizzou's assistant football coaches.

This story was originally published December 9, 2017 at 2:27 PM with the headline "Missouri football coach Barry Odom gets two-year contract extension."