Jimbo Fishers buyout makes sense within college footballs current structure
If you’re at all shocked that Texas A&M, a public university, is about to pay a man named John James “Jimbo” Fisher Jr. approximately $76 million to not coach, you must be new to college football.
Fisher was fired Sunday, ending a ho-hum 45-25 run with the Aggies that failed to produce a division, conference or national title, the unofficial but heavily implied benchmarks of the 10-year, fully guaranteed $75 million contract he signed to become their coach in 2017 (and the extension he signed in 2021).
A $76 million bill to not work seems insane because it is, but there’s a discernible path that led us to this madness: A&M’s rival, the University of Texas, paid Tom Herman $15.4 million to go away in 2021. Florida State paid Fisher’s replacement, Willie Taggart, $18 million not to coach in 2019.
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My personal favorite is Will Muschamp: Fired for compiling a 28-21 record at Florida in the 2010s, Muschamp took a meager $6.3 million buyout in 2014 only to resurface a couple of years later as the coach at South Carolina, which owed him $15.5 million when it fired him in 2020 — amid a $58 million budget shortfall.
Muschamp later agreed to a lesser, lump-sum payment of $12.9 million. So if you do the math, that’s just under $20 million paid to a man with one double-digit-win season in his career to not go to work. America really is a land of dreams, as long as you’re equal parts persistent and shameless and think Dri-Fit polos and Just For Men constitute formal wear.
Then there’s Auburn, the first school to break the $20 million buyout mark back in 2020 when it dumped eight-year coach Gus Malzhan for $21.5 million. After a badly bungled search for his replacement, the Tigers hired former Boise State coach Bryan Harsin only to fire him two years later, costing boosters another $15.3 million. Auburn replaced Harsin with Hugh Freeze, a coach with zero championships, a robust history of scandal and on-field schematics eerily similar to … Gus Malzhan. And it only cost $36.8 million, not including what the school had to pay its coaches to actually coach.
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Delirious yet? There’s not a single private school mentioned above, though private institutions aren’t above this stupidity, either. (Google “Charlie Weis net worth” and Go Irish!) That doesn’t mean taxpayers or college students are eating this, but someone certainly is. In A&M’s case, Athletic Director Ross Bjork told reporters “unrestricted contributions” to A&M’s 12th Man Foundation (a fan-funded group separate from the school) would shoulder the initial payment to Fisher ($19.4 million by January) and the athletic department budget would make adjustments to cover the rest over the long haul.
In a hilarious understatement, Bjork described Fisher’s tab as “monumental.” But to the rest of the industry, it’s a massive windfall: A&M not only has to pay out Fisher’s deal but also the contracts of his assistants, who will almost certainly not be retained by the next coach.
Then it has to hire that next coach, who will command a substantial contract of his own. After all, the Aggies have to justify buying Fisher out with a hire that’s somehow better. And whatever “better” actually means is beside the point; the new guy just has to feel better to the people making donations.
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Right now, A&M’s move costs it “just” the gaudy $76 million. But it’ll end up committing to double that once a replacement is found, and the economic impact of the ripple effect will total in the hundreds of millions. Chances are high the next Aggies head coach is a head coach at the Football Bowl Subdivision level, meaning another opening will occur, and so on, and so on.
And it’s no coincidence almost every coach mentioned in this writing is a client of super agent Jimmy Sexton. Sexton, sometimes single-handedly, controls the chess board when schools are vetting college football coaching inventory. When you fire one of his clients, he’s just as likely to charge you for another.
This churn is the point of the entire operation because the agents catch a check from the guy on the way out and the one on the way in. An ESPN report published Tuesday counts $146 million in dead money for Power Five conference head coaches since the start of the 2022 season, and that doesn’t even include the recent firings of Michigan State’s Mel Tucker and Northwestern’s Pat Fitzgerald, both of whom are tied up in buyout litigation with their former schools related to the scandals that forced them out.
So what breaks this up? What stops this? Industry insiders are watching two things.
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First: The frequency of buyouts persists in large part because college football’s structure of a limited playoff field throttles the passion of a school’s donor base to justify its current coach by the standard of competing for the national title, thereby creating perpetual unease among schools with disposable income.
South Carolina, a program with zero national or SEC titles, was willing to pay about $13 million just for a clean slate. Muschamp’s replacement, Shane Beamer, earned an extension worth about $6.1 million per year after an eight-win season in 2022. As of this writing, he is 19-17 overall with the Gamecocks and 9-14 in SEC play. Muschamp’s and Beamer’s deals were handled by Sexton.
The four-team postseason format will expand to 12 schools next season, which could calm more uneasy boosters. And a school such as South Carolina might eventually have a puncher’s chance at making a field of 12.
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Second, and most importantly: That same ESPN report quotes B. David Ridpath, an Ohio University sports business professor, who nails the biggest fear inside the college coaching economy: “What I fear is this is only going to get larger. The only thing that will stem this tide is if the labor is paid” and more money goes to the athletes instead of the coaches, Ridpath told ESPN.
Contrast that with the stance taken publicly by the NCAA and key members of Congress, who are pushing the narrative that there would somehow be a less-watchable, less-interesting college sports product with paid players.
Despite the cries of the NCAA and politicians, demand will persist for success in college football regardless of the payroll format.
The real boogeyman, at least for coaches and agents, is a world in which a $76 million buyout is impossible not because of donor malaise but because of existing financial commitments to athletes.
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If you think college sports is too much of a business, you’ve already lost. It has been a billion-dollar industry for decades. Arguing that a shift in that wealth from the sidelines to the field will ruin the game has zero economic or sociological merit.
You can’t undo capitalism, but you can redirect it, and the market will follow. Anyone standing in the way of that has a hand in the current pot and will convince you it’s totally logical that a man called Jimbo is going to be paid about $76 million not to coach football.
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