Before you do, a number.

Greg Chick of NILnomics dug through 21 years of athletic-department filings, and here is the one the sad-violin crowd skips: the typical power-conference school now spends 23 ordinary American paychecks a year on coaches it already fired. Not on coaching them. On having fired them.

Read it before you spare anybody a tear.

Plus, from the guest chair: the contract clause that pays a coach in full whether he ever works another day.

Michigan sells itself as the Leaders and Best, and this week it paid twelve million dollars to confirm the athletic department was running on neither.

The bill came due after Sherrone Moore was fired in December for a staff relationship he hid, and Michigan turned Jenner and Block loose on the department. The firm ran hundreds of interviews and reviewed more than 20,000 documents, chased 90 leads down a hotline, and reported back that nobody still on the payroll knew a thing while the football program ran on what it gently calls “weak oversight”. President Domenico Grasso eased out athletic director Warde Manuel with "the deepest respect for Warde and his countless contributions," a breath before citing "failures to quickly and effectively act on allegations of wrongdoing." Read those two lines nose to nose and tell me which one is the eulogy. Then admire the dismount, because the man the report faults for oversight stays on as special adviser to implement reforms, bureaucrat for the guy who missed it now teaches the seminar on catching it.

A campus this proud of minting business leaders and managers just spent eight figures learning it could not find one down the hall. More here: [LINK] [LINK]

The newest revision to the college sports bill caps any conference at nineteen schools, a fearless blow against expansion drawn one seat past where the Big Ten already sits.

The same page tells any Power program that wants to change leagues to first spend five years as an independent, which is the transfer sit-out year handed to entire universities by the same sport that spent two decades imposing it on teenagers. The $700 million revenue trigger that began pointed at the SEC and Big Ten now snares the ACC and Big 12 too, because all four are about to clear it, so Cruz and Cantwell fenced the neighborhood after everyone had already moved in. Meanwhile, the lawmakers are rewriting the whole thing to please the two conferences the bill exists to corral, which Ross Dellenger says have "sort of come back together" over their shared grievance. Jesse Dougherty of NOTUS adds the quiet part, that "time is not on the bill's side."

The SEC and Big Ten spent a year not speaking, and an act of Congress reunited them, which may be the only thing this bill manages to expand. More here: [LINK] [LINK]

I get buyout questions every week, so I went and got you someone who reads and dissects the contracts.

Greg Chick runs NILnomics, and if Coaches Hot Seat is a thermometer, his newsletter is the accountant's ledger underneath it. He digs through the filings most of us only see quoted in headlines, then puts the code and the FOIA documents out in the open so anyone can check his math. When I posted on his newsletter, he could not have been more gracious, so I asked if he would return the favor and settle the buyout question for this audience once and for all. He said yes, and then he went back twenty-one years and set what coaches get paid against what the rest of us earn.

The four charts below are his. Read them, then go subscribe to NILnomics. Tell him CHS sent you.

Greg, the floor is yours.

Fifteen FBS head coaches were fired during the 2025 season. The contracted buyouts attached to those firings totaled roughly $228 million — an all-time record, and nearly double the previous high. Brian Kelly alone walked away from Baton Rouge owed $54 million over six years, the second-largest severance package in the sport's history. Penn State agreed to pay James Franklin around $49 million to stop coaching, a figure that shrank to about $9 million only because Virginia Tech hired him weeks later. Since 2004, schools have committed more than $1.1 billion to coaches they fired.

Every autumn, the discourse follows the same arc. A coach starts 2–4, the message boards light up, and somewhere in the replies a voice of reason appears: these are human beings, they have families, imagine your job status being debated by 40,000 strangers.

Fair enough. But before you extend too much sympathy to the man on the hot seat, it's worth looking at exactly how well the seat pays. I pulled twenty-one years of coaching compensation and severance data — every FBS conference, fiscal 2005 through fiscal 2025 — and set it against what the median American worker earns. The short version: the hot seat is the most comfortable chair in American labor. The long version is below.

Two metrics, from the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, built from the NCAA financial reports (MFRS) that public schools file every January:

Coaches Compensation is everything a school's coaching staff is paid — all sports, not just football — including bonuses, benefits, and money routed through third parties. It excludes severance.

Total Coaching Severance is what schools pay coaches and administrative staff who no longer work there. Buyouts, in plain English, plus the support-staff wreckage that comes with a regime change.

The figures below are medians per school, by conference and fiscal year. Not the Ohio States and Texases of the world — the middle school in each league. Three caveats worth keeping in your back pocket: this covers public institutions only (private schools don't have to show us their books); conference membership reflects each fiscal year, so realignment moves schools between lines (the "Pac-12" of FY2025 is literally Oregon State and Washington State); and nothing here is inflation-adjusted — not the coaching data, and not the wage benchmark. That's deliberate. Both series are in the same nominal dollars, so every comparison between them is apples-to-apples.

The wage benchmark is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' median usual weekly earnings for full-time workers, annualized. In 2005, the median full-time American worker earned about $33,900 a year. In 2025, about $62,500.

Hold those two numbers. They're the flat black line at the bottom of the next chart.

In fiscal 2005, the median SEC athletic department spent $8.8 million on coaching compensation. In fiscal 2025, it spent $41.2 million. That is a 368% increase — a 4.7x multiple, compounding at 8% a year for two decades, through a financial crisis, a pandemic, and the collapse of the amateurism model that supposedly made all this money necessary in the first place.

The full 20-year scoreboard, by median coaching payroll:

Read the bottom row again. Over the same twenty years that the median power-conference coaching payroll grew 4.7x, the median American worker's pay grew 1.8x — an 84.5% nominal raise that, after inflation, is closer to a rounding error. Had the median U.S. salary grown at the SEC's coaching-payroll rate since 2005, the typical full-time American worker would earn about $158,000 today. They earn $62,500.

A few other things the chart tells you:

The only year-over-year decline in the entire 21-year series is fiscal 2021 — the COVID year, when the SEC's median dipped 8.4%, and the power-conference median fell 5.1% on temporary pay cuts. It took exactly one fiscal year to erase the discount: the Autonomy 4 median jumped 13.4% in FY2022 and never looked back. The pandemic pay cut was the exception that proves the trajectory.

Realignment is legible in the data if you know where to look. The Big 12's line sags in FY2024 as four American Athletic imports dilute the median, then recovers as the Pac-12 refugees arrive. Conference USA — strip-mined for members three times over — is the only group in the dataset whose 20-year growth (+49%) trails cumulative inflation. Coaching-pay austerity in college football exists in exactly one place, and it's the league that keeps getting raided.

And the Sun Belt is the quiet outlier: 3.9x growth, the fastest of any Group of 6 league, from the lowest base. Even the sport's proletariat got a 295% raise.

Millions blur together. So convert the units.

In 2005, the median power-conference athletic department's coaching payroll equaled 220 median American salaries. In 2025, it equals 557. The median SEC school went from 260 to 659. Because both series are nominal, inflation cancels out of the ratio entirely — this is the pure, real divergence between coaching pay and everyone else's pay.

Put it in time instead of dollars: the median SEC athletic department now spends one full median-American-annual-salary on coaching compensation every 13 hours. In fiscal 2025 alone, that median SEC school added $5.3 million to its coaching payroll — a single year-over-year raise equal to 84 median U.S. salaries.

And this isn't just a power-conference phenomenon. The median Group of 6 school — the ones passing the hat for guarantee games and fighting for CFP access-bowl scraps — carries a coaching payroll equal to 146 median salaries, up from 95 twenty years ago. Even in the MAC, the famously thrifty corner of FBS, the median coaching payroll equals about 120 ordinary paychecks.

So when a coach at a middling power-conference program has a bad October, remember what the institution around him is spending on the profession he sits atop. The question was never whether he can afford the criticism.

Compensation for coaching is at least pay for work. The more remarkable line item in these filings is the pay for not working.

In fiscal 2005, the median power-conference school paid $48,057 in total coaching severance — roughly one schoolteacher's salary worth of buyout money, department-wide. In fiscal 2025, the median was $1.44 million. That is a 30x increase, against the 4.7x growth in compensation itself. Severance is the fastest-growing expense in this entire dataset. The median crossed $1 million for the first time in FY2024 and set a new record the following year; the Big 12 ($1.78M) and ACC ($1.76M) medians both hit all-time highs in FY2025. The SEC's high-water mark came in FY2022 — a median of $2.48 million per school, the fiscal year that swallowed the notorious 2021–22 carousel.

Remember: these are medians. Half of power-conference schools paid more. The typical Autonomy 4 athletic department now spends the equivalent of 23 median American salaries every year on people it has already fired.

Meanwhile, the median Group of 6 school reported $0 in severance in 13 of the last 21 years and has never cracked $65,000. The buyout arms race is a power-conference sport. G6 schools can't afford to fire people; A4 schools have industrialized it.

And here is the part you should sit with: the record isn't in this chart yet. Fiscal 2025 ended in June 2025. The historic fall-2025 firing spree — 15 coaches, ~$228 million — lands in the FY2026 filings. The tallest bar on that chart is about to get a much taller neighbor.

The 2025 ledger, for the record: Kelly ($54M, LSU), Franklin ($49M contracted, Penn State), Mark Stoops ($38M — 75% of his remaining money, contractually due within 60 days — Kentucky), Jonathan Smith ($33.5M after two seasons, Michigan State), Billy Napier ($21.2M, Florida), Hugh Freeze (~$16M, Auburn), Mike Gundy ($15M, Oklahoma State), Justin Wilcox ($10.9M, Cal), Sam Pittman ($9.3M, Arkansas), on down to Trent Dilfer's $2.4 million from UAB, payable in monthly installments like a car note. The SEC alone owed $138.6 million to five men for not coaching in 2025. It got so absurd that a sitting congressman introduced a bill to cap athletic-department pay at ten times in-state tuition — a formula under which Kiffin's $13 million salary would become roughly $280,000.

The fine print is where the money hides

The severance terms are often wilder than the amounts:

The no-offset jackpot. Jimbo Fisher's $76.8 million from Texas A&M in 2023 — still the record — was fully guaranteed with no offset and no duty to mitigate: an up-front lump sum plus annual checks through 2031, owed in full whether he ever works again. Gus Malzahn's 2020 Auburn deal was the same species: $21.45 million, half of it wired within 30 days, every cent owed even after UCF hired him two months later. Billy Napier's Florida contract repeated the trick in 2025 — no offset language, half due within 30 days.

The offset lottery, run in reverse. Franklin's contracted $49 million collapsed to about $9 million the moment Virginia Tech hired him — that's offset language working exactly as designed, and a reminder that the eye-popping headline number and the check that clears are different figures. LSU, by contrast, spent a month in a standoff with Kelly before formally agreeing to pay the full $54 million — conditioned on Kelly making a good-faith effort to find another job, per the "duty to mitigate" clause in his deal.

The calendar tax. Scott Frost's Nebraska buyout was scheduled to drop from $15 million to $7.5 million on October 1, 2022. Nebraska fired him on September 11. Nineteen days of patience would have saved $7.5 million; the administration decided watching more Scott Frost football was worth more than that. Arkansas faced the inverse in 2025 — waiting longer on Sam Pittman could have triggered a win-percentage clause cutting his buyout by $3.6 million. They paid for the privilege of immediacy too.

The cautionary double-dip. Notre Dame's payout to Charlie Weis after his 2009 firing ultimately reached about $18.9 million — checks that kept arriving for years while he collected new salaries elsewhere. For a long stretch of the 2010s, Weis was plausibly the best-paid unemployed man in America.

The unicorn. In 2017, Gary Andersen quit at Oregon State and voluntarily waived the remaining $12,630,555 on his contract — a move his own athletic director called unprecedented in major college sports. "Coaching is not about the mighty dollar," Andersen said on the way out. In twenty-one years of this dataset, he is the only data point of his kind. The exception is doing a lot of work.

Salary and severance still undersell the lifestyle, because the lifestyle is itemized in the contract. I went through two decades of FOIA'd deals and national contract reporting. A sampler:

The standard kit. By the mid-2010s, contract reporters described courtesy cars from local dealers (usually two), a university-paid country club membership, and a home-game suite as effectively standard issue for a power-conference head coach — the coaching equivalent of a laptop and a badge on day one. Even Gary Andersen's Oregon State deal — the man who gave back $12.6 million — came with a Corvallis Country Club membership, a $20,000 annual car allowance, and a $50,000 bonus for every win over Oregon. A 2026 review of the contracts of the just-fired 2025 class found the same DNA: luxury-dealer courtesy vehicles, private-plane access, golf memberships.

Personal jet hours, negotiated like vacation days. Nick Saban's Alabama contract granted 25 hours a year of non-commercial flight time for personal, non-business travel — use it or lose it, no rollover. Urban Meyer got 35 hours at Ohio State (one year's tab for 11 personal trips: about $120,000, billed to the university). Charlie Strong got 20 at Texas, Bill Snyder 10 at Kansas State. Florida's Jim McElwain took his allotment in cash instead: $40,000 a year.

Financial engineering your 401(k) has never met. In 2016, Michigan didn't give Jim Harbaugh a raise — it loaned him $2 million a year, seven times over, to fund the premiums on a $75 million life-insurance policy. The $14 million in loans isn't repaid until he dies, at which point the university recoups its money off the top of the death benefit, and his heirs keep the rest. Penn State later wrote a $ 1 million-a-year version of the same structure into James Franklin's 2021 extension. This is split-dollar deferred compensation, imported straight from the Fortune 500 C-suite into the Big Ten.

The coach who owns his own catchphrase. "Row the Boat" is not Minnesota's slogan — it's P.J. Fleck's. Western Michigan originally trademarked the phrase in 2013; when Fleck left, his agent's company acquired the mark outright (Fleck endowed a $10,000-a-year scholarship at WMU as consideration), and Minnesota then negotiated an 11-page licensing agreement to put its own head coach's personal intellectual property on state-university uniforms for as long as he's employed there. The Gophers scrubbed predecessor Jerry Kill's "Brick by Brick" from the building to make room.

Bonuses for things you didn't know were bonusable. Kliff Kingsbury's Texas Tech deal paid $250,000 if a Red Raider won the Heisman — five times his bonus for national coach of the year — plus $50,000 for leading FBS in total offense or total defense, and, my personal favorite, contractual creative authority over uniform and equipment design. Former Kent State coach Kenni Burns got $5,000 for beating Akron in the Wagon Wheel game. Scott Frost's UCF return pays $25,000 per top-20 national finish in specified stat categories, including "explosive plays," which the contract dutifully defines (runs of 12+ yards, passes of 15+). New Mexico's Jason Eck earns ticket-sales-growth bonuses — half of which route back into the football budget. Kennesaw State's Jerry Mack banks $5,000 whenever his glad-handing produces $50,000 in donations traceable to his efforts. Purdue skips flat amounts entirely and pays Barry Odom's incentives as percentages of a $1.5 million "performance bonus base," like a hedge fund with a fight song.

Academic money, itemized. Kenny Dillingham's Arizona State contract features a team-GPA ladder — $37,500 at a 2.7, stepping up to $150,000 at a 3.0 — inside an academic-incentive package worth up to $935,000, including sweeteners tied to how many players enroll in the honors college. Six-figure GPA bonuses showed up in the 2025 fired class's contracts too. And Charlotte's Tim Albin has the most 2020s clause imaginable: $25,000 for a strong APR score — but if the NCAA's APR metric ceases to exist, his bowl bonus automatically increases by $25,000. His agent hedged against the collapse of the NCAA's academic-measurement regime. In writing.

The impossible bonus. East Carolina's MOU with Blake Harrell promises $50,000 if the Pirates are ranked by the CFP selection committee immediately following the national championship game. The committee does not issue rankings after the national championship game. Somewhere, a compliance officer signed that.

The ultimatum clause. The purest specimen of the genre: Iowa's 2023 amendment to offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz's contract — the son of the head coach, reporting to the athletic director because of state nepotism law — took a $50,000 pay cut and pegged his continued employment to the offense averaging 25 points per game (defensive and special-teams scores counted!) plus seven wins. Fans built tote boards for the "Drive for 325." Iowa averaged 19.5. He was gone by Halloween. It remains the only known coaching contract where the hot seat had a posted speed limit.

And the market-protection clause to rule them all. Saban's final Alabama contract required the university to meet with him every February, calculate the average pay of the three highest-paid SEC coaches and the five highest-paid nationally, and raise his salary to match the higher figure if he'd fallen behind. Contractually guaranteed top-of-market status, in perpetuity, by formula. Everyone else negotiates raises; Saban indexed himself.

None of this is an argument that coaches are bad people, or even that they're irrationally paid — schools sign these deals with open eyes, chasing revenue that genuinely exists. It is an argument about where your sympathy budget should go during firing season.

The median power-conference athletic department pays its coaches 557 ordinary American salaries a year, plus 23 more to coaches it already fired, plus the cars, the club dues, and the jet hours. The man on the hot seat negotiated his guarantee before he ever lost a game; when the end comes, it arrives as a wire transfer with more zeroes than most fans will earn in a lifetime — sometimes half of it inside 30 days, sometimes owed in full no matter what job he takes next. James Franklin's worst-case scenario in 2025 was $9 million and a new Power 4 head-coaching job before the season ended.

So debate the hot seat freely. Argue the buyout math, the timing, the replacement lists. Just skip the part where we mourn for the coach. In fiscal 2005, getting fired at a power-conference school was a professional setback. In fiscal 2026, it's the best-compensated event in American labor — and per this dataset, it has never been a better time to fail upward.

The guy replacing him got a raise, too.

Thanks, Greg. Now you see why he was the guy to answer this one.

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That is the issue, and every last item in it came with a price tag.

Friday, we put Dave Aranda on the table. Seated shoulder to shoulder with the biggest checkbooks in Texas, the Baylor coach called the spending cap "the ceiling" for some programs and "the floor" for others, and quietly filed Baylor under have-not. Carry one number until the piece drops: 36-37. That is his entire record in Waco, one game under .500 across six seasons, from the same coach who two summers ago bragged that Baylor's edge was paying players. The have-not, as it happens, landed a blue-chip transfer quarterback and runs one of the fatter budgets in the league.

Baylor's checkbook is open, and its excuse is loaded, and Friday we find out whether either one can win a football game.