It’s no secret that college coaching salaries are on the rise. It wasn’t so long ago that making $2 million as a coach put you in the upper echelon of the salary rankings. These days, making $2 million per year as a head coach would put you outside of the top 50 nationally.

That’s what makes the money Paul “Bear” Bryant made as a head coach all the more jarring. When Alabama hired Bryant as head coach in 1957, landing the man they thought was “the best coach in the nation,” they handed him a 10-year contract that was thought to have paid him $17,500 per year.

With inflation, you might think that would look a little better by today’s numbers. You would be wrong. That would equate to a salary of about $146,000 in 2015’s dollars. Or, in other terms, less than what most position coaches make.

By the late 1970s, Bryant was making around $45,000 a year, triple what his original deal with Alabama was worth annually. Better, right?

Again, wrong.

With inflation, that equals out to slightly less than what his late-1950s salary was worth in today’s dollars. Alabama definitely spent its money wisely, getting six national championships and 13 SEC titles during Bryant’s tenure.

It would be nearly impossible to peg what Bryant would actually be worth today at the end of his career. Not just because he could have demanded any kind of money he wanted, but also because there are so few comparisons with coaches who have the track record and tenure that Bryant had at Alabama.

Joe Paterno coached at Penn State for 45 years, but he was reportedly only making about $500,000 near the end of his career. In 1999, coming off his second national title, Bobby Bowden was awarded an extension that paid him about $1.5 million per year, which comes out to a little over $2.1 million in 2015. After that, the coaches who measure up to Bryant’s stature, both in tenure and success, are hard to find.

Before we dive into this theoretical exercise, it’s worth noting one major historical tidbit: throughout his career, Bryant insisted that his salary be $1 less than the university president, something he stuck to throughout his time at Alabama. Bryant believed it was symbolically important for the school’s president to make more than the football coach, and his salary remained $1 less than the university president for his entire Alabama career. Current UA president Judy Bonner earns $535,000 per year, so Bryant would have theoretically limited his salary to $534,999 in 2015.

While that answers our question about what Bryant would be paid, it’s not quite as fun as trying to figure out Bear’s actual worth.

To make this exercise a bit more exact, we’ll use Bear Bryant at the end of the 1973 for our theoretical salary negotiations. He had just won his fourth national title and seventh SEC title with Alabama (eighth SEC title overall). At this point in his career, he was inarguably one of, if not the best coach in college football.

It’s also worth noting that Bryant coached in a far different era. His first three championship teams were all-white, coming before integration. He also gained legendary status with some questionable coaching tactics; go read about the Junction Boys at Texas A&M to get a sense for some of Bryant’s practice techniques. These things wouldn’t fly in 2015, and would weigh in much more heavily in contract negotiations now than they did in Bryant’s heyday.

Heading into 2015, there are six active coaches with national championships on their resumes: Nick Saban, Les Miles, Steve Spurrier, Urban Meyer, Bob Stoops and Jimbo Fisher. In 2014, per USA Today’s coaches salary database, those six made an average salary of $4.79 million, not including bonuses. We can assume that would probably be the floor for Bryant, whose four titles would put him on par with Saban and one ahead of Meyer.

Bryant finished his career with a winning percentage of .780, but at the end of 1973 had a career winning percentage of .729, bogged down by two 6-5 seasons in 1969-70. That ranks him ahead of Miles and Spurrier but behind Saban, Stoops, Meyer and Fisher.

To that point in his career, Bryant had won a championship approximately every seven seasons, although he’d done it once every four seasons at Alabama. The Alabama figure puts him around the same frequency as Saban (once every 4.75 seasons) and Meyer (once every 4.33 seasons) and well ahead of the other four championship-winning coaches, who each have one title on their resume.

Of all the factors that play into a coach’s salary, championships are among the very strongest negotiating points. Bryant’s current-day peers in that category, Saban and Meyer, have an average salary of about $5.77 million. Meyer has a much shorter track record than Saban does, but we can assume that if he keeps on winning at Ohio State, his salary will come much closer to matching Saban’s by the time he’s eight years into his tenure.

With that in mind, Bryant’s worth would likely skew closer to Saban’s $7.16 million take from 2014 than Meyer’s $4.54 million. Given Saban’s expertise in handling the modern coaching world and his dominance in recruiting — things Bryant in 2015 would have to prove he can handle — it would be safe to peg Bryant’s worth somewhere slightly below Saban’s, which we’d estimate in the $6.5-7 million range