There is a push to endow each coaching position, in each sport. What this means in effect is that a donor, in this case Pat Eilers, gives enough money that when invested with the Notre Dame Endowment, will produce enough revenue with its annual return that will cover the coaches salary in perpetuity.
In this example the $3 million will be invested by CIO Scott Malpass and his team, with the expectation that the annual return will be equal or greater than roughly 5%, or $150,000. This amount will be used to pay the DB coach and will not come out of the athletic department budget. In years when the return is greater than 5% the surplus will be reinvested into the corpus of the fund, which will allow it to grow. The ultimate goal is to have each coaching position, and each athletic scholarship, endowed so that they can come off the "payroll' of the athletic department. Stanford and USC are light-years ahead of us in that regard, and allow them to utilize those funds on other things.
