ATHENS — Remember when Kirby Smart was supposedly trying to convince Scott Cochran, Alabama’s strength and conditioning coordinator, to join him at Georgia?

As widely assumed, Alabama paid up amply to keep Cochran.

Cochran will earn $520,000 under a new contract that was approved on Tuesday and made public, according to Al.com and other media reports. That’s a raise of $105,000 for Cochran, one of the most widely-respected strength coaches in college football.

Smart has never confirmed whether he pursued Cochran, and if so how hard, although the two were known to be very close.

Smart instead hired Scott Sinclair, who is set to earn $220,000 this year. While that’s $10,000 more than his predecessor, Mark Hocke, it’s obviously well under what Cochran is earning to stay at Alabama.

Meanwhile, as previously reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Alabama’s new defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt is earning $1 million, a decrease from the $1.3 million he earned in the same job at Georgia last year. Georgia is paying the difference, as Pruitt still had two years left on his contract.

Georgia owed a total of $6.2 million to its ousted coaches, the bulk of it ($4.1 million) to Mark Richt, and the bulk of the rest of it to Pruitt and Brian Schottenheimer, who each still had two years left on their contracts. Here’s a story from earlier this year with those details.