On the first day of March Madness 2018 — otherwise known as the NCAA Basketball Tournament — the University of Buffalo (UB) play against the University of Arizona at the Taco Bell Arena in Boise, Idaho. Arizona’s coach Sean Miller, 49, brings a lot of experience on the court. The former Pitt point guard went on to become a 3x gold medalist with USA Basketball before landed his first head coaching job at Xavier in 2004. He’s been coaching Arizona since 2009. (Oh, and his brother Archie Miller is head coach at Indiana.)
UB head coach Nate Oats slipped into his head coach job in 2015 after Bobby Hurley left UB to coach Arizona State. (Oats was an assistant coach at UB.) While Sean Miller’s annual salary is approximately $3.6 million; Oats’ salary is $355,500. Or, was. It was announced this week that Oats signed a 5-year extension which comes with a $600,000 base salary and incentives for postseason success. That’s a 69% increase. According to Buffalo Business First, Oats just became one of the highest-paid employees in the State University of New York System. The Arizona vs. Buffalo game will air Thursday, March 15 at 9pm on CBS, right after the Kentucky vs. Davidson game.
