Coach buyouts piling up past $150 million, raising questions about whether the frenzy is sustainable

College Football’s Costly Coaching Carousel: Buyouts Reach $185 Million as Season Unfolds

College football’s midseason coaching carousel is spinning at a dizzying pace, with high-profile dismissals already costing universities approximately $185 million in buyouts by Week 10 of the season.

The firings began just three weeks into the season when UCLA’s DeShaun Foster and Virginia Tech’s Brent Pry lost their jobs. Seven weeks later, six more coaches joined the unemployment line, including several prominent names. A quarter of the Southeastern Conference’s head coaches who started the season have been dismissed, along with longtime fixtures James Franklin of Penn State and Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy.

These decisions come with staggering financial implications. Athletic departments are shouldering enormous buyout obligations at a time when higher education funding faces increasing scrutiny and universities have begun sharing millions in revenue with student-athletes for the first time in history.

“It’s not a sustainable pattern,” explained Professor Michael LeRoy, a labor and employment relations expert at the University of Illinois. “Even without revenue sharing, it would be challenging. These figures have been growing exponentially over the past five to 10 years. Power conference coaching contracts are in this escalating spiral that involves larger buyouts, longer terms and more restrictions on terminating contracts.”

The financial burden coincides with rising expectations. Making the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff has become the minimum acceptable outcome for many high-profile programs. This pressure, coupled with the leverage held by sought-after coaches who will inevitably be candidates for openings at prestigious programs like LSU, Florida, and Penn State, perpetuates the expensive cycle.

When asked if this pattern can be broken, LeRoy expressed doubt: “I don’t think schools have the willpower. They’re always going to be concerned about what their rivals are doing, and there’s always going to be a rival that will break the bank to hire the best coach.”

Texas coach Steve Sarkisian, who earns $10.8 million annually with a buyout exceeding $60 million, views these massive contracts as simply “the cost of doing business.”

“Sometimes you’ve got to pay the guy that’s leading the ship,” Sarkisian remarked. “If you hired a coach and don’t think he’s the right coach for you, that’s part of it. You got to pay him. That’s just the way it works… If you’re not willing to pay a coach and what his contract is, well, you’re probably not going to get the coaches you thought you might get.”

While some wealthy programs like LSU claim they can cover Brian Kelly’s buyout without using university funds, even well-resourced institutions might reconsider their approach given the mounting financial obligations across the sport.

Mit Winter, a college athletics attorney at Kennyhertz Perry, suggests schools might pivot to more fiscally conservative contracts: “Some schools, even if they might have a donor base that could cover these buyouts, might take the opportunity with all the changes in college athletics now to say, ‘Alright, we’re not going to agree to contracts that are 10 years with guaranteed compensation that would put us on the hook for a huge buyout.'”

Winter proposes shorter contracts with fewer guarantees and more performance-based incentives and extensions as potential alternatives.

The landscape shift in college athletics has fundamentally altered what makes a successful coach. Today’s environment, shaped by revenue-sharing models, NIL compensation, and transfer portal dynamics, requires different skills than previous eras.

“A coach who had been successful 10 or 15 years ago under a model of recruiting high schools across the country for five-star players, that isn’t the same model as today,” LeRoy noted. “These hires are retrospective in nature, so you’re in effect hiring a coach who was successful under a different business model for coaching success, and therefore, when the coach doesn’t produce the way he had produced in the past, pressure builds really quickly to fire him.”

Ohio State’s Ryan Day acknowledges the constant evolution as simply part of the profession. “I stopped saying this is crazy. I just said, this is the job,” Day explained. “Every year it just changes so much, and you have to be willing to adapt.”

Day described the modern coaching experience as “herding cats,” adding: “You can work all day and feel like you did nothing all day from early in the morning to late at night, and you feel like you got nothing done, but you actually did.”

For universities embarking on expensive coaching searches, LeRoy offers a sobering comparison: “These coaching contracts are somewhat like buying a Powerball ticket in the millions of dollars in the hopes that you will cash in. Somebody does cash in, but a lot of people are out of a lot of money.”