College coaching carousel now part of the game

It was a rough weekend for quite a few coaches in college football.  It was rougher still if you were a high dollar donor-booster to a struggling football program.  

Using numbers compiled by Front Office Sports, LSU, Florida and Arkansas have combined to generate $84 million in liabilities for head coaches who are no longer wanted on their sidelines next season, or even the remainder of this season. That’s just in the Southeastern Conference, and doesn’t account for a few additional million to buyout lower level coordinators.  

Thus far, across all conferences in the top grouping of college football programs, $169 million in buyout liabilities are outstanding. We should also be reminded that the season is far from over, with quite a few other coaches remaining on the “hot seat”.  There will almost certainly be tens of millions added to that number by the end of the year.

On the flip side, it was a great weekend if you’re a coach ready to move up to a new school. It was the best of weekends if you’re super-agent Jimmy Sexton, who will get a cut of many of the buyouts, many of the new hires, and from those he’ll get renegotiated raises and extensions for as their names are floated as possible replacements for newly fired coaches.

Let’s note here that these are almost exclusively private funds, raised by the top echelon of wealthy donors to athletic departments. This bill isn’t one handed to taxpayers. The insanity can continue so long as those funding it look at the expense as an investment in the future of their programs.

Those willing to write the checks do so for many reasons. To the wealthiest of donors it may just be a rounding error in their checkbooks. Their likely tax deduction is canceled out by the taxes eventually paid by the fired coaches, so again it’s not really a taxpayers’ problem.

Some may do it for nostalgia. Some want the bragging rights.  But at the end of the day, it’s a business decision. 

Professional sports – of which we’ve long since acquiesced that major college athletics are now professional entities – live or die based on fan support. Colleges are even more susceptible to fair whether fans, as they have more competitors than official “pro” leagues. They have fewer rules controlling their revenue sharing, athletes compensation without contracts, drafting versus recruiting, and a myriad of other ways they can lose competitive advantages. Winning helps fix most of those problems. Losing quickly becomes a death spiral.

Fans are quick to point at these numbers to pay someone not to coach and declare it obscene. Fans are equally quick to demand any and every coach be fired whenever they experience any form of unpleasantness mid-game.  Just ask Mike Bobo.

The conundrum is that the fans must be kept happy for a program to be viable.  At the same time, the fans demand what is often impossible or unadvisable. Firing a coach because someone is temporarily upset might not be the best long term solution nor establish your school as a reasonable place to coach.  Just ask Auburn.

Coaches, universities, and boosters know the market, and their value.  A winning coach pays for himself. Firing a losing coach isn’t cheap, but keeping a losing coach destroys long term brand value.  

One of the biggest problems here is fan expectations vs reality.  There are currently 136 football teams in the top division of the sport. About half of the teams think they should be viable national championship contenders. A dozen or so have fan bases that don’t believe a single loss is acceptable. 

When reality sets in, it can’t be the fans fault. So “someone must be held accountable”. It’s easier to demand someone be fired than accept that expectations were not reasonable.  

After all, it’s not the everyday fan that is paying for it. The fan is neither writing the buyout check, nor having to deal with the public nor private consequences that follow. Often, they’re not even buying a ticket. Their entire investment is emotional plus the time spend in front of a television.

In a world of bread and circuses, especially in the South, college football is our circus. It’s our distraction from the rest of our bread making week.  The Romans used circuses to keep the masses happy, especially when bread was hard to come by.  

Firing a football coach gives some the feeling of power and control over a world where it seems the individual has less and less to say over our everyday lives. It’s not the one lever most would choose, but it is one that is mostly harmless in the grand scheme.  And thus far, it preserves the steady and increasing supply of bread into the sport that seems to be choking on it.