Tom Davis didn’t go into coaching to get rich; it just happened that way.

“It probably was good timing, to some degree,” the Drake men’s basketball coach said last week.

Davis got his first big-time job at Boston College in 1977, just as college basketball was starting its climb into the entertainment stratosphere. Soon after, BC became a charter member of the Big East Conference, became a regular on a fledgling sports network called ESPN and got one of Nike’s first shoe contracts.

All of which helped Davis supplement and, eventually, greatly improve upon his starting salary of $12,500 a year. By the time he briefly gave up coaching in 1999 – after Iowa declined to renew his contract after 13 seasons with the Hawkeyes – he was making about $420,000 a year.

Even that is out of step with what a men’s basketball or football coach makes these days at a major NCAA Division I college. Minnesota’s Dan Monson has a contract that will pay him $706,000 this season, and Tubby Smith is making a reported $2 million a year at Kentucky.

That’s a long way from $12,500.

“It is eye-popping,” Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said last week.

But not out of order. Salaries for coaches for big-time programs are skyrocketing for a reason, said Delany and others who spend a lot of time examining college athletics.

The subject is particularly urgent at Minnesota, which is going through contentious negotiations to extend football coach Glen Mason’s contract. Through a variety of contract clauses, Mason made close to $1.5 million this season, and it’s unlikely he would stick around for anything less.

And with one year left on his deal, Minnesota would have to buy out his final year if they can’t agree to terms – likely to the tune of an annuity worth nearly $2 million. That’s before finding and paying his successor.

To succeed in big-time college sports, a school will do what it has to do.

“Nobody is holding a gun to the head of any university saying, ‘You need to pay this person this amount,’ ” said John Fossum, a Minnesota business professor who studies compensation trends.

It’s all about the market, Fossum said. The pool of coaches who can succeed at college football or basketball’s highest level is small, just as the pool of potential corporate CEOs is small. And the impact a big-time sports program has on an institution is substantial.

The revenue alone is impressive. Minnesota, for instance, will make more than $6.1 million this school year from the Big Ten’s television deal with ABC and ESPN. It will make nearly $2.3 million from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, and $1.93 million from bowl money earned by the Big Ten Conference’s seven bowl teams.

That, obviously, goes a long way toward paying the budgets of Minnesota’s 25 sports programs, only three of which make money – football, men’s basketball and men’s hockey.

At least Minnesota has hockey; most of the Big Ten’s 250-plus programs are run, Delany said, on football and men’s basketball money, revenue that includes ticket sales, TV contracts and postseason payouts.

Yes, the coaches of those sports are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, he said, but their programs’ success is vital to the operation of the entire department.

“We don’t get rid of programs that don’t work,” he said, adding that a normal business would.

Right or wrong, that is essentially why salaries have skyrocketed over the past three decades.

But can universities keep up with the inflation?

Minnesota athletics director Joel Maturi said the escalation “is a major issue in intercollegiate athletics. I don’t think I’ve been to a meeting of athletic administrators where it hasn’t been talked about.

“How many million-dollar coaches were there 10 years ago? And how many $2 million coaches are there now, and when is it going to stop? That’s the real challenge in this ‘arms race’ climate. Whatever term you want to use, it exists.”

That feeling is particularly acute at Minnesota, where Mason is using contract negotiations to get more money pumped into his program, at least in the form of assistant coaching salaries.

“Where do you find the money to do this?” Maturi said.

“I don’t mind when they tell me whether a decision I’ve made is right or wrong, but what’s disappointing is when they say I’m not committed to football. The reality is, we only have X amount of dollars.”