Overextended: Why schools rush to extend coaches

Coming off a division title that included a victory against its archrival, Auburn faced the prospect of losing its coach.

Who knows whether Gus Malzahn really wanted to return to his home state and become the head football coach at Arkansas, another SEC school, but Auburn’s leadership decided it did not want to chance it. Malzahn, who just the season before seemed to be in a precarious position with Auburn, received a $49 million, seven-year contract that makes him the fifthhighest paid coach in college football this season, according to USA Today’s salary database.

A few months later, Georgia gave Kirby Smart, whose team beat Auburn in the SEC title game and went on to play for the national championship, a similar deal after his second season at the school.

The willingness of schools to modify, amend or re-do the contracts of their football coaches, handing out huge raises and building in hefty severance payments, has helped drive the rapid escalation of salaries in the sport. In many cases, experts say, schools are unnecessarily aggressive in extending a coach, too quick to reward a small sampling of success, out-leveraged by agents, and driven by the fear of having to find a replacement.

“If we have a good coach or we think we do, we’re probably better off extending him because if we don’t, we have to let him go for whatever reason because he went to greener pastures, well, then we had the one coach that got away and it’s going to be expensive for us to pay off all the assistants who otherwise didn’t find a job and hire a search firm and hire a new coach and then pay market-grade for that particular coach. I think that that’s mistaken,” said attorney Bob Lattinville, co-chairman of the St. Louis-based Spencer Fane LLP’s collegiate athletics legal team.

Lattinville and his colleague, Roger Denny, did a review of contract extensions for football coaches at Power Five schools between Dec. 1, 2011 and Nov. 31, 2016, and concluded: “College football coach contracts are often prematurely renegotiated.”

Between the end of last season and the beginning of this season, 35 FBS schools — including 21 Power Five schools — made some type of amendment to their football coach’s contract. In some cases, such as Rutgers with Chris Ash and Minnesota with P.J. Fleck, years were added with no significant change to financial terms.

In other cases, superstar coaches such as Alabama’s Nick Saban and Ohio State’s Urban Meyer received huge new deals that justifiably put them at the top of their profession when it comes to compensation.