Athis is a time when millions of people are at risk starve and having lost 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 on his coaching responsibilities after his Tigers suffered a blowout home loss to Texas A&M that dropped them out of the AP's top 25 teams in college football. (That's after LSU finished third in September and was firmly in the top 10 for much of the season.) Kelly, who was in the fourth year of a 10-year contract worth about $100 million, will go home with more than just a box full of purple and gold office trinkets.
While the terms of Kelly's departure have not yet been finalized, his contract puts the school on the hook for 90% of his deal if he is fired for cause. $54 million. The contract does include a “duty to mitigate clause” that asks him to find another job so LSU doesn't owe him as much money. But another program would have to be desperate to hire him, considering he went 31-14 and made one College Football Playoff appearance at LSU, a school less than six years removed from winning the national title. The more likely scenario is that LSU will continue to pay Kelly $800,000 in monthly payments through 2031 while the coach, who turned 64 on Saturday, retires comfortably. It's a good job if you can get it, especially in the current economy.
In the upside-down world of college athletics dismissed the football coach is the king. Two weeks before Kelly's firing, Penn State fired James Franklin – a coach who was not only a year removed from leading the Nittany Lions to the College Football Playoff semifinals, but was instrumental in leading the program out of the fallout Monumental child sex abuse scandal; Penn State is paying Franklin $49 million for his departure. Already next week Florida ended his relationship with Billy Napierfirst full-time Gators coach in 76 years to finish with a losing record (22-23); Florida will pay him $21 million upon his departure, and half of that amount must be paid. November 19. When the Gators hire Napier's permanent replacement, it will be the second time in seven years they have paid three part-time head coaches. In fact, LSU finds itself at the exact point where it begins paying Kelly a severance package while cutting the school's program. $17 million buyout obligation Kelly's predecessor, Ed Orgeron.
The college football season is barely halfway through, and already 10 coaches have been fired due to school debt. $169 million buyoutsincluding six in the elite Power 4 conferences. These numbers do not include Stanford's Troy Taylor (who was fired for no reason and was able to keep his buyout terms confidential due to the university being a private institution) or the walking dead, such as Luke Fickell of Wisconsin or Mike Norvell of Florida State, who could very well be out of work by Thanksgiving. In those days, there was no worse scenario than a college coach getting fired. It was a difficult decision that had to be made in order to reverse lost cultures or get rid of the scandal. Coaches packed up their families and left town, and administrators also risked losing their jobs because of one bad hire. The ritual of humiliation was all-encompassing and the stench lingered.
But over the past few years, as college athletics has transformed from a cartel-run bastion of amateurism to a freer market favoring star players, a private equity approach has taken hold among the sports philanthropists who fuel blockbuster programs. There has been a greater openness to treating coaches as rainmakers for their $100 million athletic departments. Two years ago, it seemed outrageous that Texas A&M would pay Jimbo Fisher. record $77 million after firing him. But Georgia will owe Kirby Smart a debt of gratitude. $105 million if they fired him right nowAlthough last spring he became the highest paid coach in college football. Well, not that it would be theoretically.
And while the money used to pay these ransoms primarily comes from television deals and sponsorships earned by athletic departments, it's not hard to imagine what kind of scholarships could be awarded or women's and Olympic sports programs it could be restored with all that money. The same institutions claim financial hardship when athletes demand a fair share of the revenue they help generate—and blame buyout costs on the sponsors who pay those costs. “[Donors] They think they have a voice and they're just like a bunch of fans,” respected former coach Nick Saban. said last week. “When they get upset and disappointed, they put pressure on [athletic directors] act, and that’s how the world works.”
But ultimately it is Kelly who pisses off the more convenient villain among the media and fans of the college coaching buyout craze. While Kelly is respected for his strategic mind and ability to turn around wayward programs, he breaks with the stereotype of the good-natured college coach. He doesn't just lack the roguish energy of Orgeron or the simple charm of Les Miles, to name another LSU predecessor; he seems like a repulsive person. San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh remembers starting on Kelly's coaching staff at Central Michigan in the early 2000s with Matt LaFleur, now the head coach of the Green Bay Packers. Kelly invited them to a social event at his home, but only so they could park their cars and shovel snow, in a scene ripped from Coming to America. “We decided that being in this position, we would never treat people the way we were treated,” Saleh said. ESPN.
After LSU hired him in December 2021, Kelly, a true Irish-Catholic Bay Stater, introduced himself to a stunned Tigers basketball crowd at terrible southern accent it was widely ridiculed on the Internet. At Notre Dame, which was rehabilitated under Kelly in the 2010s, he complained about high academic standards of the school undermining his ability to build lineups. At LSU, he complained about having to pay players under the current NIL system while doing more 10 million dollars a year He also couldn’t get along with the assistant coaches – contracts that 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 appointing him to sweet revenge at Texas A&M — who Moffitt helped build the nation's third-best team, as Kelly saw for himself last Saturday. That eventually became Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, who earns about one-tenth of Kelly's salary in the state. I invite you to work as a trainer this forced LSU management to take action. Shortly after Kelly received the pink skirt, he was spotted dining alone at a Mexican chain restaurant – as if he was finally going to celebrate his birthday, but had no real friends to come over.
On Monday, Washington state Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Republican. introduced a bill entitled “Adjusting Opportunity and Accountability in Student Recruitment” (or “COACH”), which will amend the Higher Education Act of 1965. limit the total annual salary of any athletics department employee to no more than 10 times the institution's annual expenditure per full-time undergraduate student—about $280,000 in LSU's case. “There is no greater public benefit to a coach making $10 million versus $200,000,” Baumgartner. told Sportico. But the chances of his proposal making it out of committee, as Sportico's Daniel Libit rightly noted, are “smaller than the chances of every FBS coach keeping his job until the end of the season.”
College football teams prefer to consider themselves the “front porch” of their academic institutions. But lately it's more like Proposed White House East Wing Ballroom: A monstrous addition that threatens to overshadow everything else. With the average American already struggling to make ends meet, much less spend money on college football tickets, the idea of paying a coach millions of dollars to sit at home is as jarring as expecting LSU to run the table with interim coach Frank Wilson. Colleges and powerful conferences could themselves limit some of their post-employment spending by setting buyout limits and reducing coaching contracts with shorter, performance-based terms. But it's unlikely that anything will change, especially in the current political climate, until the money dries up. At this rate, that day may not be far off.
