$54 million to pay: Getting fired as a college football coach is a booming industry | College football
AAt a time when millions are at risk of going hungry and losing their health insurance benefits, struggling Americans can at least take solace in knowing that the nation’s college football coaches are doing just fine — especially Brian Kelly.
On Sunday, LSU relieved Kelly of his coaching duties after his Tigers suffered a resounding home loss to Texas A&M that knocked them out of the AP rankings of the top 25 college football teams. (That’s after LSU was ranked third in September and firmly in the top 10 for most of the season.) Kelly, who was in the fourth year of a decade-long contract worth about $100 million, will go home with more than just a box full of purple and gold office trinkets.
Although the terms of Kelly’s departure have not yet been resolved, his contract puts the school on the hook for 90 percent of his contract balance if he is fired for cause – a final bill that amounts to approximately $54 million. The contract includes a “duty to mitigate clause” that requires him to pursue another job so LSU doesn’t owe him as much money. But another program would have to be desperate enough to hire him, considering he went 31-14 with a College Football Playoff appearance at LSU, a school less than six years away from winning a national title. The most likely scenario is that LSU will continue paying Kelly $800,000 per month through 2031, while the coach, who turned 64 on Saturday, retires comfortably. It’s a good job if you can get it, especially in this economy.
In the topsy-turvy world of college sports, the licensed the football coach is king. Two weeks before Kelly’s firing, Penn State fired James Franklin — a coach who is not only a year removed from leading the Nittany Lions to the College Football Playoff semifinals, but who was also instrumental in the program’s exit in the wake of a monumental child sex abuse scandal; Penn State pays Franklin $49 million to leave. The following week, Florida severed ties with Billy Napier, the first full-time Gators coach in 76 years to finish his tenure with a losing record (22-23); Florida pays him $21 million after he leaves, half of which is due November 19. When the Gators hire Napier’s permanent replacement, it will be the second time in seven years they’ve paid three head coaches simultaneously. In fact, LSU finds itself in exactly that situation as it begins paying Kelly severance while ending the school’s $17 million buyout obligation to Kelly’s predecessor, Ed Orgeron.
The college football season has barely passed halftime and already 10 coaches have been fired while schools owe $169 million in buyouts, including six in the elite Power 4 conferences. These numbers do not include Stanford’s Troy Taylor (who was fired without cause and was able to keep his buyout terms confidential thanks to the university being a private institution) or the men’s dead like Wisconsin’s Luke Fickell or Florida State’s Mike Norvell — who could well find themselves out of work by Thanksgiving. Back then, there was no worse scenario than having to fire a college coach. It was the difficult decision to make to redress the situation by losing crops or to get out of the scandal. Coaches packed up their families and left town, and administrators also faced losing their jobs due to poor hiring. The ritual of humiliation was widespread and the stench persisted.
However, in recent years, as college athletics has evolved from a bastion of cartel-run amateurism to a freer market favoring star players, a private equity mentality has taken hold among the sports benefactors who fuel successful programs. There is greater openness to the idea of treating coaches like the rainmaking executives they are in their hundreds of millions of dollars in athletic departments. Two years ago, it seemed outrageous that Texas A&M would pay Jimbo Fisher a record $77 million. After fire him. But Georgia would owe Kirby Smart $105 million if they fired him right awaywhich is not the case after making him the highest paid coach in college football last spring. Well that’s not the case theoretically.
And even though the money used to pay for these buyouts comes primarily from television deals and sponsorships that athletic departments reap, it’s not hard to imagine the scholarships that could be awarded or the women’s and Olympic sports programs that could be revived with all that money. These same institutions cite financial hardship when athletes demand a fair share of the revenue they help produce — and blame the buyout spending spree on the donors who foot that freight. “[Donors] I think they have a voice, and they’re like a group of fans,” respected former coach Nick Saban said last week. “When they’re frustrated and disappointed, they put pressure on the [athletic directors] to act, and that is how the world is going.
But ultimately, it’s Kelly who becomes the most convenient villain among the media and fans for a college coaching buyout craze that runs amok. Although respected for his strategic thinking and knack for turning around wayward programs, Kelly breaks with the avuncular stereotype of college coaches. He doesn’t just lack the naughty energy of Orgeron or the folksy charm of Les Miles, to name another LSU predecessor; he seems to be a repulsive personality. San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh remembers his early days on Kelly’s coaching staff at Central Michigan alongside Matt LaFleur, now head coach of the Green Bay Packers, in the early 2000s. Kelly invited them to a social event at his house — but only so they could park cars and shovel snow, in a scene from Coming to America. “We decided that when we are in this position, we are never going to treat people the same way we were treated,” Saleh told ESPN.
After LSU hired him in December 2021, Kelly, a true Irish-Catholic Bay Stater, introduced himself to a stunned Tigers basketball crowd with a horrible Southern accent that was widely mocked online. At Notre Dame, which was rehabilitated under Kelly in the 2010s, he complained about the school’s high academic standards that compromised his ability to build rosters. At LSU, he complained about having to pay players under the current NIL system while committing more than $10 million a year to assistant coaches he also couldn’t get along with — contracts the school would also have to buy out. One of Kelly’s most egregious mistakes was firing Tommy Moffitt, the beloved strength coach behind LSU’s last three national titles, and setting him up for sweet revenge at Texas A&M — which Moffitt helped build the third-best team in the country, as Kelly saw for himself last Saturday. Ultimately, it was Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry — who makes about a tenth of Kelly’s salary — who pushed for the coaching job that forced the LSU board’s hand. Shortly after receiving a pink slip, Kelly was spotted dining alone at a chain Mexican restaurant — as if he was finally about to celebrate his birthday, but without any real friends to show up for him.
On Monday, Washington State Congressman Michael Baumgartner, a Republican, introduced a bill titled Correcting Opportunity and Accountability in Collegiate Hiring (or COACH) that would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to cap the total annual compensation of any athletic department employee at no more than 10 times the costs annual in-state institutional fees for a full-time undergraduate student – approximately $280,000 in LSU’s case. “There is no greater societal benefit to a coach making $10 million versus $200,000,” Baumgartner told Sportico. But the chances of his proposal being rejected in committee, as Sportico’s Daniel Libit rightly observed, “are slimmer than the chances of every FBS coach retaining their position for the remainder of the season.”
College football teams like to think of themselves as the “front porch” of their academic institutions. But lately it’s looking more like the White House’s proposed East Wing ballroom: a monstrous addition that threatens to dwarf everything else. With the average American already struggling to make ends meet, let alone chase college football tickets, the idea of paying a coach millions of dollars to stay home is as shocking as expecting LSU to run the table with interim coach Frank Wilson. Colleges and power conferences themselves could reduce some post-employment expenses by setting buyout cap terms and shortening coaching contracts with more performance-based terms. But much is unlikely to change, especially in the current political climate, until the money dries up. At this rate, daylight may not be far away.
