For a UF coach, getting fired is like winning the lottery

Mediocrity has never been so lucrative.

A middling record as coach of the University of Florida football team earned Dan Mullen $12 million. Just to go away.

Nice work (or rather nonwork) if you can get it. Getting fired as head coach has become the sweetest deal in higher education. And it keeps getting sweeter.

Just four years ago Jim McElwain, Mullen’s predecessor, was given $7.5 million to get lost. This was the very same public institution that was still paying off the $6.3 million buyout owed Will Muschamp, the coach discarded in 2014.

That means that the University of Florida has owed $25.8 million over the last eight years for unloading three consecutive head coaches, all of whom had compiled winning records, though apparently not winning enough.

All three had been rewarded with fat raises and contract extensions before they fell out of favor. Mullen’s new contract was signed just six months before he was banished. McElwain was rewarded with a new contract in 2017 but was gone before the 2018 kickoff.

UF is hardly alone among public universities lavishing discarded coaches with otherworldly buyouts.

In 2019, Florida State University football coach Willie Taggart’s exit package amounted to $18 million. With a business plan that demands multibillion-dollar TV deals to showcase unpaid athletes, $18 million buyouts amount to chump change.

ESPN reported that from Jan. 1, 2010, to

Jan. 31, 2021, 86 public universities competing in the NCAA’s major conferences paid out $533.6 million to departing football and basketball coaches. This year’s batch of failures will pocket another $100 million — probably more.

It’s as if athletic directors were tossing around Monopoly money. Except in their version, losers who fail to pass Go still collect millions.

And if a coach remains consistent in his inglorious ways, he can rack up even bigger buyouts.

After Muschamp accepted his $6.3 million Florida buyout, he was hired as head coach by the University of South Carolina, which more than doubled that amount last year to get rid of him. His $12.9 million payoff after a losing season was $3 million more than the University of Alabama’s Nick Saban earned that year for coaching an undefeated national championship team.

Of course, if Saban gets hard up for cash, maybe the Crimson Tide could lose a few more games. Then he could get fired after program boosters grow restless and collect his own $38.4 million buyout from the university.

Louisiana State University coach Ed Orgeron, whose team won the national championship in 2019, was chased out of Baton Rouge this fall, albeit with $16.9 million to ease him into unemployment. His former assistants will collect a combined $9 million.

When Guz Malzahn, who never had a losing season at Auburn University, was zapped last year, a $21.4 million buyout enabled him to pay the rent.

Buyouts are utterly disconnected to the financial difficulties facing major college athletic programs in the time of COVID-19. Last year, when a $19 million budget shortfall caused the University of Texas athletic department to lay off 35 employees and reduce salaries for another 273, outgoing football coach Tom Herman was given $15 million and his assistants received another $6 million.

Buyout clauses for active coaches who still have their jobs are even crazier.

According to CBS Sports, Jimbo Fisher, who left FSU for Texas A&M four years ago, has negotiated an astounding $95.5 million buyout if A&M boosters grow weary waiting for him to better Alabama and Georgia, while Dabo Swinney (national champ, 2018) will make do with a piddling $47.5 million if the Clemson alums turn on him.

ESPN reports that $20 million-plus buyouts await coaches at Ohio State, Iowa State, Indiana, West Virginia, Tennessee and probably others. Major colleges routinely add multimillion-dollar buyout clauses to coaches’ contracts.

Simple math dictates that many of them will collect because every Saturday half the major college football geniuses, hired to win and win now, must lose. (Except those coaches who padded their schedules with patsies.) Perhaps giant buyouts were contrived to offset college boosters’ unrealistic, mathematically improbable expectations.

Truth is, buyout scandals are hardly as outrageous as the fabulous annual salaries lavished on head coaches, assistant coaches and even athletic directors by institutions nominally dedicated to education.

Dan Mullen was earning 50 times more than the average salary of a full professor at the University of Florida. UF could hire 41 professors with the money the school paid Mullen’s 10 assistant coaches. His defensive coordinator earned more than the university president.

As for the unpaid young athletes whose skills (and considerable physical risks) create so much wealth that the parasites feasting off college sports get rich even by losing — let ’em eat cake.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @ grimm_fred.

Fred Grimm