Wisconsin over the weekend fired head coach Paul Chryst. His buyout was $16.4 million (later negotiated down to $11m) but they didn’t care. They wanted him gone so badly that they were willing to pay him millions of dollars not to coach.
Nebraska did the same with Scott Frost. They could’ve waited three weeks and the buyout would’ve gone down to just $7.5 million. But they couldn’t wait. They were so desperate to fire him that they paid an extra $7.5 million to do it immediately instead of waiting three weeks.
People are already talking about firing Jimbo Fisher, whose contract with Texas A&M runs through 2031 and who is still guaranteed a further $95 million from Texas A&M.
And apparently, the idea is actually being entertained, according to Paul Finebaum:
It’s not imminent. But what if A&M finishes 6-6 or something like that?
You think the rich A&M boosters are going to sit around and wait another 9 years for his contract to run out? They will find a way to get rid of him, even if it means paying him $95 million not to coach.
As it is, there are already 5 fired college football coaches being paid more than $50 million collectively to not coach.
This has got to stop.
I’m not even mad or jealous of the guys who are getting paid all that money.
It’s more the fact that it is so WASTEFUL.
At the same time as we’re talking about student loan forgiveness and how ludicrously expensive college has gotten, we’ve got these universities wasting tens of millions of dollars to pay fired coaches.
Just think of all the ways that money could be better spent than paying it to a guy who is no longer your program’s head coach. You could funnel all that money into an NIL fund–you know, to land yourself the type of quality players that the coach you just fired couldn’t. You could upgrade your facilities. You could divide it up amongst the student body evenly and give everyone a tuition rebate.
You could fly over town in a helicopter and rain the money down on people.
Literally anything else is a better use of that money.
I love college football so much. It’s one of my very favorite things in the whole world.
But there is so much about this sport that is utterly ass-backward and outrageous. The NIL situation, for one. The fact that it took college football, um, 150 years to implement a playoff to decide a champion–and when they did, it kinda sorta arguably ruined the sport (although they are rectifying it with the 12-team playoff, thankfully).
And then this terrible, unsightly and quite frankly out-of-touch fired coach buyout nonsense. Not to get political or anything but millions of Americans are struggling just to pay the bills (not to mention with student debt) and these colleges are just like, “It costs us $15 million to fire our coach? Yeah, that’s fine.”
It’s insulting. It’s like taking a big pile of money and setting it on fire on national television.
College football has always been an elitist sport–a sport with haves and have-nots.
But this buyout nonsense we’re seeing is just ignorant. It’s a bad look, and they have to figure out a way to put an end to it.
Fade the Public 