Keeler: CU Buffs just gave women’s basketball coach JR Payne a nice raise. She’s earned another.

ALBANY, N.Y. — Don’t you wish CU dished out nickels the way Jaylyn Sherrod drops dimes? At least 30 Division I women’s college basketball coaches made more money than the Buffs’ JR Payne this season, per USA Today. Of those 30, only a dozen won more games than Payne has (49) over the last two years.

“I think JR has a lot of things (she brings to the school),” CU guard Maddie Nolan, a Michigan transfer, said last week when I asked about Payne. “She cares so much. And she watches so much film … I do think a lot of coaches do that, but she is in there breaking (things) down, and it’s the little things. And the little things, especially at this level, especially at this point in the (NCAA) tournament, add up to be big things. And so it’s that.

“Then, off the court, she really cares. And whether you’re playing 40 minutes a game or five minutes a game, she’s, ‘How are you doing? What do (you) need? How can I help you?’ And just creating that bond with people. It’s like you want to run through a brick wall for her.”

Whether CU’s administration follows Nolan into the mortar, though, remains to be seen. After two straight berths in the Sweet 16, a pair of postseason runs stopped short by Caitlin Clark, arguably the best women’s basketball player ever, Payne might be the Buffs’ biggest coaching bargain.

Oh, we know about the Easter basket AD Rick George gave Payne at this time last year, ripping up a contract worth a reported $417,500 a year and replacing it with a five-year extension with a salary bump to $730,000.

But the Buffs also need to ask themselves this: Is middle of the pack good enough when it comes to a game, and a stage, that’s taken off the way women’s basketball has?

Among Pac-12 women’s hoops programs, CU’s average home attendance ranked third in the league this season. Yet Payne sat fifth in salary for 2023-24 among women’s hoops coaches at Pac-12 public schools. And if you factor in Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer and USC’s Lindsay Gottlieb, two private schools whose contracts aren’t subject to open-records requests, the Buffs coach more than likely checks in at seventh in the circuit.

VanDerveer, the all-time wins leader in women’s college basketball, reportedly earned $2.28 million in 2016, according to a tax filing. Three women’s coaches at Pac-12 public schools — Arizona’s Adia Barnes, Oregon State’s Scott Rueck and Oregon’s Kelly Graves — topped the $1-million mark, followed by UCLA’s Cori Close ($774,722). And then Payne.

Of that group, just VanDerveer, Gottlieb and Close have racked up more victories since 2022-23 than CU. Not too shabby.

“When I was (thinking about) coming here, playing against them, it was like, seeing how her team battled, seeing how much they wanted to win, I’m like, ‘This is something I want to be a part of,’” noted CU guard Tameiya Sadler, a transfer from Washington.

“And JR is just so — she’s ready to compete every day. No matter what we do, we always have to compete. And that was something that drew me to this school.”

Remember how disappointed you felt Saturday afternoon after Iowa ran the Buffs ragged? That was the hope, whispering in your ear like Jiminy Cricket. That was the bar for success, with one eye on Clark and the other on the Final Four in Cleveland.

Guess who raised it?

“I think what we’ve established — again, it’s not just the coaches or the staff,” Payne said last week. “I keep talking about our upperclassmen, but they came here when we were not good and they knew we were not good. And we talked to them about the amount of work it would take daily to get better and to achieve what we wanted to achieve. And they signed up for that and wanted that.

“So I think the culture of our program is very, very strong. I keep going back to, ‘We’re just going to try to be great today.’ … I think if you can continue to recruit great players that want that and will buy into that and believe in a system, believe in unselfish play and things like that, then I think the sky is the limit.”

Only the great Ceal Barry has taken the Buffs to more Sweet 16s than Payne. It had been 21 years since someone had led CU to back-to-back regional semis.

And this is interesting: CU’s home attendance this winter would’ve been the fourth-highest in the SEC. Payne’s salary among SEC public schools, meanwhile, would’ve ranked eighth.

In a post-Deion world, surely Ralphie’s wallet stretches a little further than it used to. I don’t know if you can put a price on hope, but the going rate for relevance keeps climbing by the year. Right along with the Buffs.

Want more sports news? Sign up for the Sports Omelette to get all our analysis on Denver’s teams.