ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
Forty-nine million dollars - that's how much James Franklin is owed. He was, until Sunday, Penn State's head football coach for 12 years. Franklin has a career record of 104 wins, 45 losses and just led his team, the Nittany Lions, to the College Football Playoff a year ago. Now he's polishing up his resume, checking out LinkedIn job boards or something. I wouldn't feel too bad for him, though. His buyout is the second largest in college football history. The top spot goes to Jimbo Fisher, who got $76 million when he left Texas A&M in 2023.
Is this trend - coaches getting millions to not coach - something we'll be seeing more of in the next several years, or is this an outlier? Stuart Mandel is the editor in chief of The Athletic, where he's written extensively about college football's buyout culture, and he joins me now. Stuart, welcome back.
STUART MANDEL: Thanks for having me.
LIMBONG: All right, now that number - $49 million - that's a pretty staggering amount to pay someone to not coach. Like I said at the top, it's the second-largest buyout in college sports history. How did we get here, to a place where coaches are getting these massive golden parachutes?
MANDEL: Well, it starts with the fact that these contract negotiations - there's a big mismatch between the parties. You have ADs on one side - college athletic directors - who, frankly, this is a very small part of their job. And they're going against these super agents, who are sharks who know how to negotiate a very one-sided contract. You know, James Franklin was hired 12 years ago. It's not like they hired him away from somewhere in 2021. He was already their coach. He had won a lot of games, but they weren't doing particularly great at that moment. But he had been rumored for job - a job at USC and possibly LSU, and his agent leveraged that into an incredible 10-year, fully guaranteed $75 million contract. And so to get out of that, it costs you a fortune.
LIMBONG: Yeah. I think you've reported that buyout totals could approach something like quarter of a billion dollars this year?
MANDEL: Yeah, I mean, that's a rough estimate. This is turning out to be a - just a brutal year for coach fires. We've already had a half dozen at the major schools, and we're only halfway through the season. And frankly, if you look at a list of, like, the top 30 paid coaches in the country, they all have buyouts like that.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
MANDEL: So if we end up going from a half dozen to a dozen, you could see that number getting to that 200 million figure, yeah.
LIMBONG: Penn State has had to make several cost-cutting measures over the past several years. And some within the university argue that paying someone this much money to not coach is - this is, like, kind of a waste of resources. Do those critics have a point?
MANDEL: Well, yes and no. I mean, if you go to the academic side of universities, they are truly, in many cases, having budget crises - right? - for many reasons. But when people say, well, they should just take the $49 million they were going to pay the coach and give it to the math department, you know, that's just not realistic. Athletic departments are, for the most part, self-sustaining, separate from the university at these higher levels. And as they always joke - right? - like, 110,000 people aren't going to watch a chemistry lecture. That's not what the TV networks are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to show. So really, there are always exceptions, but for the most part, these are athletics decisions. These are not university decisions.
LIMBONG: Stuart, just to wrap up real quick, how big do you think these buyouts will get?
MANDEL: I mean, we might see a - finally a slowdown because, you know, a lot of these deals were made before they had to pay the players. This is really the first year where schools can directly pay up to $20.5 million a year to the athletes. So that money's got to come from somewhere. That, though, assumes they will - that they will actually be fiscally responsible, which college athletic departments almost never are. And so the growth of the buyout number should slow down, but I'll believe it when I see it.
LIMBONG: Stuart Mandel is editor in chief at The Athletic. Stuart, thanks so much.
MANDEL: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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