There is more than that huge, football-shaped Waterford crystal-topped trophy riding on the outcome of today's Bowl Championship Series title game between Florida and Oklahoma.

There is the other "championship" dear to a head coach's heart.

The one at the bank.

Bad economy or not, the winning coach from today's game will be set up quite nicely in the salary sweepstakes with a chance to pass Southern California's Pete Carroll as the best paid in the college game.

Carroll, who, according to Forbes, is paid $4.4 million per season by the Trojans, got to the top by being the most recent owner of two national championships. Not that either Oklahoma's Bob Stoops or Florida's Urban Meyer, who have one each, need ever worry about where their next Porsche or mansion is coming from.

Stoops, according to reports, is hauling down an annual compensation package of $3.8 million, though he will actually earn more than $6 million for the current season having triggered a $3 million incentive bonus for staying 10 years with the Sooners. Meyer manages to get along on slightly less, $3.38 million.

Bobby Bowden, Dennis Erickson and Joe Paterno join Carroll as the only other active coaches with two national championships. But they are all under $3 million per season, having had the considerable misfortune of not having won their titles in this decade, when the arms race in college athletics allowed salaries to really get crazy.

Recent history tells us that next to discovering oil on the property or hitting megabucks in Vegas, it is best to be a football coach who has just won a national championship. In the hoopla, they can pretty much write their own tickets, renegotiating increases of 100 percent — or more — are not unheard of. The most recent one, Les Miles of Louisiana State, parlayed his into a leap from $1.8 million to $3.75 million last year.

In that, college football is very much a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately business. And when you have freshly served up a national championship, the vault doors are sprung wide. School presidents and alums hardly quibble about the numbers, opening up the checkbook and saying, "how much?"

Of course, it behooves a coach to maximize his leverage because when you have won one, the faithful start expecting, well, a second. And, in Carroll's case, a third.

Ask Stoops, who won his national championship in 2000 and has had to endure, in the interim, questions about whether he can win another without some of the assistants that have moved on. Meanwhile, should Meyer go without a championship in Tim Tebow's golden years in The Swamp, there will be much to answer for in Gator Nation.

Especially when the guy down the hall, men's basketball's Billy Donovan, sports a couple.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.