If you watched college football on Saturday, you saw yet another set of misleading political ads urging you to call your local congressman and tell them to SAVE COLLEGE SPORTS! The latest ones give the impression that women’s and Olympic sports are in trouble because having to pay athletes a salary is going to bankrupt their schools.
On Sunday, Penn State announced it has fired 12th-year coach James Franklin, for whom they now owe a roughly $45 million buyout.
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These schools aren’t broke. They’re just wildly irresponsible spenders.
And if they find a private equity firm to come rushing to their rescue, as the Big Ten is actively seeking, they’ll just find a way to light that money on fire, too.
We’re only halfway through the 2025 regular season, and it’s clear we’re headed to a full-on coaching carousel bloodletting. Stanford (Troy Taylor), UCLA (DeShaun Foster), Virginia Tech (Brent Pry), Oklahoma State (Mike Gundy), Arkansas (Sam Pittman), Oregon State (Trent Bray) and now Penn State have already sent their guys packing, and the likes of Florida (Billy Napier), Wisconsin (Luke Fickell) and several more will likely come.
By year’s end, the combined cost of those buyouts could well exceed $200 million. Let that sink in for a second. Supposed institutions of “higher learning” have managed to negotiate themselves into paying $200 million to people who will no longer be working for them.
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Just how much is $200 million? Well, for one thing, it’s enough to pay for the scholarships of roughly 5,000 women’s and Olympic sports athletes.
You may be asking yourself: How do schools keep entering into these ridiculous, one-sided coaching contracts that cost more than the House settlement salary cap ($20.5 million) to extricate themselves from?
Well, consider the dynamics at play in those negotiations.
On one side of the table, we have an athletics director who spends 95 percent of their time on things like fundraising, marketing, facilities, answering fan emails about the long lines of concession stands, and so on. Once every four or five years, if that, they have to hire or renew a highly paid football coach, often in the span of 24 to 48 hours.
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And on the other side, we have Jimmy Sexton. Or Trace Armstrong. Or another super-agent whose sole job is to negotiate lucrative coaching contracts. It’s a bigger mismatch than Penn State-UCLA … uh, Penn State-Northwestern … uh … you know what I mean.
Franklin’s extremely one-sided contract is a perfect example.
Franklin, who was hired in 2014 from Vanderbilt, performed a remarkable turnaround at the start of his tenure, lifting the Nittany Lions from post-scandal/NCAA consent decree purgatory to a surprise Big Ten championship in his third season. He won 11 games in three of the four seasons from 2016-19, before backsliding to 4-5 in the COVID-19 2020 season. But Penn State began 2021 5-0, with wins over two ranked foes, to jump from No. 19 in the preseason AP Poll all the way up to No. 4.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, USC fired Clay Helton two games into the season, creating months-long speculation over who would be the Trojans’ next coach. The resurgent Franklin began showing up in every sportswriter’s list of candidates.
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Fast forward to late October. News emerged that Franklin had abruptly fired his agent at the time and hired … Sexton. The man who has negotiated hundreds of millions in salaries (and buyouts) for the likes of Nick Saban, Kirby Smart, Lane Kiffin and, yes, Jimbo Fisher, he of Texas A&M’s infamous, fully-guaranteed $90 million contract.
Sexton, leveraging that reported USC interest, immediately went to work behind the scenes for Franklin, a notorious complainer who had been complaining some time about Penn State’s facilities and other football investments. I’m sure he made it clear to Penn State’s athletic director at the time, Sandy Barbour, that she needed to meet his checklist, or else.
At the same time they were negotiating, however, their 2021 season was rapidly imploding. Three consecutive October losses, including the famous 20-18 nine-overtime Illinois game, as well as a home loss to No. 6 Michigan, left PSU 7-4 heading into Thanksgiving week, after which USC figured to finally make its hire.
It was right then that Barbour announced Franklin’s new 10-year, $75 million contract extension. Fully guaranteed, of course. For a coach who, though he’d accomplished a lot, had not yet reached a College Football Playoff in his eight seasons there, and who may or may not have been a flight risk. USC ended up hiring Lincoln Riley.
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Coaching salaries have been going up and up for decades, of course, but that 2021-22 cycle reached new heights in absurdity. In addition to Franklin’s windfall, USC gave Oklahoma’s Riley a 10-year, $110 million contract, and LSU gave Brian Kelly a 10-year, $95 million deal; and the most insane of all, Michigan State’s 10-year, $75 million deal for the since-fired Mel Tucker.
As of today, none of the four schools has gotten the return they were seeking.
And of course, those deals reset the market for everyone else — especially the guaranteed money. Before Franklin, only two schools — Texas A&M (Fisher) and Auburn (Gus Malzahn) — had ever paid more than a $20 million buyout.
Now, according to USA Today’s coaching salary database published last week, none of the 30 highest-paid coaches in the country have a buyout of less than $20 million.
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In the past, we might have just rolled our eyes, proclaimed, “You idiots!” and moved on. But the current college sports climate all but demands that there needs to be more accountability of the people making these deals.
At the present moment, the Big Ten’s mostly public universities are nearing a deal to take $2 billion from an outside investor (a pension fund in California) in return for a slice of equity in what would essentially be a new shell company to house the league’s media and sponsorship businesses.
The Power 4 have used the House settlement as a means to install both an arbitrary salary cap for how much they can pay their athletes, while also establishing a commission that limits what the athletes can make from other parties.
And they’re all lobbying Congress to pass the SCORE Act, which would give them an antitrust exemption to avoid getting sued for limiting what the athletes can make. As of the moment, we’ve heard of no movement to subject coaching contracts to an NIL Go-type mechanism.
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Probably because they’d all be declared above market value.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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