A college football coach gets $77m not to work as US education suffers
Texas A&M University fired football coach Jimbo Fisher on Sunday, amid his latest disappointing season. The axing is richly deserved. The money Fisher will get not to work is not. In late 2017, A&M poached Fisher – who had won a national championship at Florida State in 2013 – from FSU with a 10year, $75m, fully guaranteed contract that broke the collegiate record with its total value. The school extended that deal and tacked on dollars in 2021, but Fisher’s performance never got close to matching his paycheck, and the “fully guaranteed” part of the contract would come back to haunt the Aggies. He lost at least four games every year but 2020, when pandemic interruptions created a zany season whose chaos included a 9-1 record and No 4 finish in the rankings for A&M. But even that team fell short of loftier goals like a Southeastern Conference title or College Football Playoff berth.
The on-field failures belied not just his deal, but his advantages in the job. A&M signed some of the best recruiting classes in college football, including a 2022 class that scouting agencies considered one of the best ever. In assembling those classes, Fisher had the help of a rich and enthusiastic booster corps, buttressed by oil money who craved success. Nobody was better positioned to take advantage of a recent liberalization of limits on athlete compensation by third parties than A&M. In discussing the firing on Sunday, AD Ross Bjork decried a lack of “consistency, positivity, and confidence” in Fisher’s program.
By orders of magnitude, Fisher will get the biggest buyout the college sports industry has ever seen. Comically, he is not obliged to hunt for another job that might lighten the Aggies’ financial load. His contract lacked the standard “offset” language in many football coaching contracts. The Aggies will pay him $19m in the next 60 days, and then Fisher will cash $7.3m checks every year through 2031. Bjork said the first big lump sum would come from unrestricted donation coffers, and A&M would fund the ensuing annual payments by baking the cost into annual athletic budgets. Two things are true at once about Fisher’s buyout: First, A&M can indeed afford to fire Fisher and pay tens of millions more to replace him and his entire coaching staff. Second, doing so is the most obscene illustration yet of a college athletic business that on one hand acts as if there’s no money to pay its players and, on another, believes that certain kinds of misadventures are worthwhile no matter the price tag.
The disgrace of an institution like A&M paying a buyout of this sort is easy enough to spot. A&M is the flagship of a public university system, and Texas spends less on public schools per enrolled student than all but a few other US states. (National Education Association data estimates for last school year had Texas spending less than $12,000 per student, compared to a national average of $16,000.) Numerous school districts in the state’s poorest areas have failed to meet achievement targets. Every state’s public schools could use more money. So, certainly, could those in Texas. Yet here’s a public school setting an eyewatering sum aflame to get a mediocre college football coach to go away. A buyout this large is spectacular, but a similar story unfolds every coach-firing season in any number of states.
The trouble is that the inflows and outflows aren’t so simple. A&M will pay the first lump sum to Fisher, nearly $20m, with donor money, Bjork said. After that, the $7m annual payments will come out of the school’s preplanned athletics budgets. Nobody reaches into an elementary school teacher’s pocket, takes out a wad of cash, and sends it to the fired coach. Yet that athletic department only exists and is popular because it is attached to a public school with a proud tradition and passionate alumni base. Every taxpaying person in the state of Texas has done a little something to build up Texas A&M, the University of Texas, and the state’s many smaller public colleges. And this isn’t just about schools, but about what the people who support them care about. Every A&M donor helping to fund Fisher’s buyout could’ve put that check toward tablets or school lunches in a poor district. That they didn’t is a matter of priorities.
And that’s one reason the buyout industrial complex will only grow larger: No single administrator or booster could stem it even if they wanted. America’s football obsession is durable enough that there will alwaysbe enough money for mega-buyouts. After all, that obsession also results in bigger media-rights payouts and more robust revenue streams for teams like the Aggies. Their conference, the SEC, starts a lucrative new television deal with Disney next year. All of their competitors will use that money to try to beat them, so when A&M pondered whether it was worthwhile to throw Fisher out of the plane with a golden parachute, there was no real reason to think about whether they should. They only had to confirm they could. The conversation could not have taken long.