Of course, a few days before I leave for a much needed vacation, USA Today released their updated NCAA coaching salary database. For sports junkies, there’s an unlimited number of analysis and visualizations that can be done on the data.

I took a quick break from packing to condense the data to a csv and write up a very rough R script. Note: sqldf rocks but installing tcltk (if you have too) can be a bit of a pain. Look here for help with tcltk.

library(ggplot2)
library(sqldf)

salaries <- read.csv("2011Salary.csv", header=T, sep=",")

result <- sqldf('select
                  a.Conference,
                  sum(a.SchoolPay) / b.spc as avg_pay
                from
                  salaries  as a
                join
                  (select Conference, count(*) as spc
                  from salaries
                  where SchoolPay > 0
                  group by Conference) as b
                on
                  a.Conference = b.Conference
                group by
                  a.Conference')

chart <- qplot(result$Conference, result$avg_pay,
                geom="bar",
                stat="identity",
                fill = I("grey50"),
                main = 'Average Coaches Salary by Conference',
                xlab = 'Conference',
                ylab = 'Average Pay')

chart + opts(axis.text.x=theme_text(angle=-45))

Outputs the following

Most surprising result? PAC-12 coaches average ~ $400,000 less than the Big East.

Full code is available on bitbucket.

Edited per G.'s suggestion: sqldf rocks, tcltk can be tricky.