A few weeks before the revenue sharing era began, I talked to a former Power Conference coach who was weighing his options for the upcoming season. Picking a destination, especially at this time of year, is tricky because it’s all but a guarantee to be a short-term role, likely as an analyst or some sort of “special assistant to the head coach” position.
But during that conversation, he echoed something that I’ve been thinking about since the post-2024 coaching carousel slowed after a brief, relatively quiet run.
There’s an expectation that a chaotic coaching carousel awaits in 2025.
Some would argue that there’s an expectation that the days of coaching carousel chaos left once the House settlement came down. After all, athletic departments are looking for creative ways to come up with that $20.5 million annual payroll now.
Many might have been asking a certain question given the financial shift of big-revenue sports.
Doesn’t that mean the days of big buyouts in college football are over?
Nope. Not if you’ve been paying attention.
If you’ve been paying attention, you saw what I saw last year. Two things played out, and perhaps they were related. One was that the SEC didn’t have a coaching change for the first time since the post-2018 cycle. As a result, there wasn’t a single 8-figure buyout paid to a head coach that was fired in 2024. Neal Brown (West Virginia) and Ryan Walters (Purdue) led the way with buyouts of $9.8 million and $9.6 million, respectively (via USA Today).
It was natural for many to connect those dots and assume that atypical development was the byproduct of the upcoming revenue sharing era. In the latter half of the decade, perhaps we’ll see some evidence that suggests that buyouts for FBS coaches are no longer increasing in the way that they did during the TV rights boom of the 2010s.
But “not increasing” is different from “not a thing anymore.” Eight-figure buyouts being paid are still going to be a thing in college football. How could they not be?
In 2024, there were 46 FBS coaches in the USA Today database that had 8-figure buyouts in place. Mind you, that’s not including coaches like Lincoln Riley, Mario Cristobal, Marcus Freeman and Dave Aranda, all of whom reportedly had buyouts of 8 figures, but those terms weren’t officially disclosed at their respective private universities. So if you add in those 4, that’s 50 FBS coaches who had 8-figure buyouts last year. Even if that number takes a slight dip in 2025, that’s still dozens of coaches who’ll be paid north of $10 million if they’re fired.
I’ve got breaking news for the “big buyouts are dead” crowd: those guys don’t have jobs in perpetuity.
It wasn’t as if the House settlement turned FBS coaches into Supreme Court Justices. This is still college football, wherein disappointing teams + sparse stadiums + frustrated boosters=fired coaches. Imagine if Auburn goes 5-7 again and the vibe is “well, we don’t want to pay a $15 million buyout because we need that money to fund our roster, and he’s done a solid job of that so far.” That’s not how this will work. If that scenario plays out, I’ll change my stance. Until then, let’s use some context instead of generalizing.
Perhaps there was a school or 2 that used the House settlement as an additional reason why they kept a head coach instead of firing him, but let’s remember something else about the season that played out.
So many of those hot-seat coaches entering 2024 got themselves off the hot seat
Last August, USA Today did a column on the top 10 hottest seats in college football. Look how the years played out for those coaches:
Billy Napier, Florida — Won 8 games (+3 wins from 2023), kept job Ryan Day, Ohio State — Won national championship (+4 wins from 2023), kept job Butch Jones, Arkansas State — Won 8 games (+2 wins from 2023), kept job Sonny Cumbie, Louisiana Tech — Won 5 games (+2 wins from 2023), kept job Clark Lea, Vanderbilt — Won 7 games (+5 wins from 2023), kept job Sam Pittman, Arkansas — Won 7 games (+3 wins from 2023), kept job Lincoln Riley, USC — Won 7 games (-1 win from 2023), kept job Scott Satterfield, Cincinnati — Won 5 games (+2 wins from 2023), kept job Joe Moorhead, Akron — Won 4 games (+2 wins from 2023), kept job Dave Aranda, Baylor — Won 8 games (+5 wins from 2023), kept jobLiterally every coach on that list kept their jobs. Why? Well, 9 of the 10 had multi-win improvements, and the only one who didn’t was Riley, who was in Year 3 of a 9-figure contract with a buyout that was reportedly $90 million at the end of 2024 (H/T Pete Thamel).
If there’s a big-picture takeaway from the post-2024 coaching carousel, it’s that a stunning number of coaches who entered the year in hot-seat conversations did better than expectations. The most disappointing coaches were guys like Mike Norvell and Brent Venables, both of whom got significant extensions ahead of the 2024 season.
Venables is an interesting person to dissect with this “revenue sharing era impacting coach buyout spending” discussion. His buyout after 2025 will be $35 million. That’s at a place like Oklahoma that hasn’t had to pay a head coach buyout in the 21st century (Bob Stoops retired and Lincoln Riley left for USC). It’s also at a place that has 2 losing seasons in the 21st century, both of which belong to Venables. One would think that a 3rd such season would be curtains on the Venables era, which would leave a very Florida-Will Muschamp type of stench to it.
But could the revenue sharing era save someone like him who has recruited well both at the high school level and in the transfer portal? As the Tulsa World’s Berry Tramel pointed out on a recent episode of The Saturday Down South Podcast, there’s perhaps a different financial vantage point now than there would’ve been at the start of the decade.
“I don’t know that Oklahoma can afford to fire (Venables) unless disaster hits and it’s 4-8,” Tramel said. “You know what $35 million can do for a football roster? … At Oklahoma, that money can be used for a whole bunch of offensive tackles and wide receivers and the next John Mateer. If you’ve got Brent Venables, you’ve got a defense. You know that. Go fund you an offense and you won’t have to worry about not winning enough games.
“I think Brent is actually a lot safer than most people do just because I don’t know that OU has the money to sit around and say, ‘Hey, we’ll pay off our coach and go get all these ballplayers.'”
These are unique times, but it’s still big-revenue athletics
There are more factors than ever to consider when firing a head coach. While the financial floor is tremendously high for schools in the Big Ten and SEC under their current TV contracts, there’s also never been this type of money up for grabs with a $1.3 billion pool as part of the College Football Playoff’s 6-year agreement with ESPN. You can fund a whole lot of athletic programs if you’re an annual Playoff team and getting $4 million per Playoff victory.
It’s financial malpractice for a Power Conference program to pretend that dynamic isn’t in place. Keeping a losing coach around for another 2-3 years to save on a slightly less expensive buyout doesn’t make sense if you consider the monetary upside of being in the mix in the expanded Playoff.
What feels inevitable is that the SEC will have several 2025 firings that get the coaching carousel moving along. That’s how it worked after the quiet post-2018 cycle when the SEC didn’t have a single head coach fired. After 2019, water found its level and 4 SEC coaches were fired. History tells us that 2025 could have a similar feel to it, which would create a trickle-down to the rest of the sport.
That sounds like SEC arrogance, but it’s reality. The last time an SEC head coach left the conference for another job was James Franklin going from Vanderbilt to Penn State after the 2013 season. SEC vacancies have been — and will continue to be — what sets the market.
The market might’ve looked a bit irregular at the halfway point of the 2020s, and it was understandable why some viewed it as a turning point.
But 2025 will show why that quiet coaching carousel was more of a detour than a new path.
It’s a new era in college football, but here’s why big buyouts and an active coaching carousel await in 2025 Saturday Down South.
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