Most notable is Jimbo Fischers price of $77 million from Texas A&M. He toyed around the school for 5+ years and finished with a record of 45-25. Not bad but apparently Texas A&M thinks they are better than that because they paid $77 mill to go away. That's a lot of money for a public university to pay someone not to do anything. This year (2025 for us, we don't know what year it is where you are from) we've seen multiple firings at top tier football schools. Franklin at Penn State, Kelly at LSU, and Napier at UF. These coaches are all significantly under performing based on these universities expectations. These schools expect to win all the time with no down years. The punishment for not winning is the coach being fired and then cashing in on a winning lottery ticket. Franklin estimated to get $49 million from Penn State. Kelly estimated to get $54 million from LSU. Napier estimated to get $21.7 million from UF. This is millions of dollars going from publicly funded schools to pay these coaches to leave. This is inspiration for those college students who are struggling. Let the lesson be even if you do a poor job, make sure you have the right contract in place so you can still get paid.
Do we think that these schools should not pay for their coaches? No, we think coaches should get paid and paid well. Coaching, especially in a team environment, is important to the growth and development of young people. Because most of these athletes are not going to play at the professional level. However, we do think it is ridiculous that these schools hire coaches with no performance based clauses in them. As if a "for cause" firing is only regarding them doing something illegal. If a professor had a student panel and 60% of them were failing would you blame the students? Or the professor? If their academic record is not up to standards we assume that is part of the a teaching professors job description to actually get students to learn.
If your expectations for your football team are undefeated... well, firstly, you should lower those expectations but secondly, as a university you should contractually mandate what constitutes a failing grade for a coach. If a coach wants to make $10 million a year but won't sign a contract saying he will win 7+ games a season or be at risk to be fired without pay... You probably shouldn't hire that coach. Why? They either have low expectations for the team or lack of confidence in themselves to hit their goals.* Either way we wouldn't want that person coaching for us. The job is coaching football. So, public universities why is their performance on the field not a part of their contractual obligations?
*The argument is that other schools will pay these coaches guaranteed contracts to come coach. They will and you (yeah, you college athletic director) should let them. We know you have to because you feel the pressure to hire that coach because he is the next Nick Saban and will become the winningest coach in football history. The chances of that are almost zero. Get over your FOMO because as you've read from this lame blog post a lot of those "top" coaches who got those contracts end up getting fired for underperforming. So let someone else pay them to fail. Then once they do you can pick them up on the cheap! Oh, you won't want them then? Exactly.
