ATHENS - Josh Brooks’ compensation at Georgia sits in the middle of the SEC pack, but his latest bonus haul shows how quickly the numbers can climb when the Bulldogs keep piling up wins, trophies and academic marks.
Georgia’s athletic director is tied for ninth among SEC athletic directors in annual base and supplemental pay, and he earned $400,000 in bonuses after last season. Brooks will make $1.5 million in base and supplemental pay this season, and his contract averages $1.75 million annually through June 30, 2031, according to information obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request.
At the top of the league’s pay scale, Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte remains the benchmark. Del Conte signed an 11-year extension in 2025 for $38 million, per Front Office Sports, and averages $3.5 million a year.
Former Georgia Tech athletic director J. Batt, now at Kentucky, will make $2.6 million this season and average about $3 million per year over his six-year deal, placing him third among SEC athletic directors in published data acquired by the AJC.
Brooks’ own contract is loaded with incentives, and he hit all three this season. Those bonuses include $200,000 for a Top 10 finish in the Learfield Directors’ Cup, $100,000 if all UGA teams finish with a four-year Academic Progress Rate of 930 or better, and another $100,000 if the average grade-point average for Georgia athletics is 3.25 or higher.
UGA said at its fall Athletic Association Board of Directors meeting Friday that Georgia athletes produced a record 3.28 cumulative GPA in the 2025-26 athletics season. That came during a year in which the Bulldogs won three national championship trophies and posted their third Top 10 finish in the Learfield Directors’ Cup over the last five years.
Georgia finished eighth in the Learfield Directors’ Cup, third among SEC schools behind Texas and Florida, and set a school record with 1,081.25 points.
Brooks called it “a year to remember for Georgia athletics,” with football coach Kirby Smart also becoming just the fourth SEC coach to win back-to-back conference title games and matching former Florida coach Steve Spurrier with five straight SEC championship game appearances.
Georgia was the only athletic program in the country during the 2025-26 sports calendar to win 12 football games, top 40 wins in baseball and reach at least 20 wins in both men’s and women’s basketball.
If equestrian counted among the NCAA’s scholarship sports in the standings, Georgia’s finish would have landed fifth nationally and second in the SEC. The Bulldogs placed third in the nation in equestrian.
Brooks also said at the fall board meeting that Georgia is about $4 million short of its five-year goal of raising $300 million in the fourth year of the campaign. The school recently tied Michigan for fourth in CNBC’s collegiate sports program valuations at $1.16 billion.
Beyond Georgia, Brooks has taken on a bigger role in NCAA operations. He serves as vice chair of the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision Oversight Committee and chairs the NCAA Football Practice and Playing Seasons Committee.
He has also been part of the NCAA committees shaping a new football calendar for the 2026 season, which reduces the portal to one transfer window and sets more severe penalties for transfer portal and tampering violations.
Now in his sixth year as Georgia’s athletic director, Brooks has hired all but three of the school’s current head coaches. One of those hires, soccer coach Keidane McAlpine, said Brooks’ background gives him a different kind of edge.
“I think that Josh having gone all the way through the trenches of athletics makes him unique,” McAlpine said.
McAlpine, one of five national championship coaches on Brooks’ staff, added: “He understands the grind of all of the jobs in the program.”
Brooks has earned a reputation for pushing every Georgia sport, and the results back it up. Nine of UGA’s 20 NCAA-sponsored sports teams finished in the Top 10 of the Learfield Directors’ Cup in their respective standings or rankings.
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