THE BOWL ELIGIBLE BLOG
The Biggest Coaching Buyouts in College Football History
From Jimbo Fisher's $76.8 million to Auburn's habit of paying coaches to leave, the biggest coaching buyouts in college football history, ranked.
Every fired coach leaves two records behind: the wins and losses, and the invoice. The second one has become the more interesting document. Buyouts used to be a quiet contractual detail. Now they are eight-figure public events, and the top of this list reads like a ranking of the most expensive mistakes in the sport's history.
The ranking below comes from our Buyout or Ballout dataset: 61 coaching tenures, of which 25 ended with a buyout figure on record. We are ranking only the tenures that carry a figure in the data, using the figure as reported there. One honest caveat before the numbers: private schools often do not disclose buyouts at all, so this list tilts toward public universities, where contracts end up in the open.
1. Jimbo Fisher, Texas A&M: $76.8 million
The standard by which all buyouts are now measured. Fisher went 45–25 at Texas A&M (his tenure seasons are in the dataset, including a 9–1 season with an Orange Bowl win in 2020), but he never played for an SEC championship, and the program tired of paying championship prices for third-place finishes. He was fired in November 2023, during a 6–4 start. The dataset carries his buyout at $76.8 million as the entered figure; some outlets reported slightly different totals, and rather than average them into a number nobody actually published, we use the figure as recorded. It is more than double what the record used to be, and nobody is close.
2. Brian Kelly, LSU: $54 million
Kelly left Notre Dame for LSU and never looked comfortable doing it. His tenure line reads 34–14 with bowl wins in the Citrus, ReliaQuest, and Texas Bowls, which at most schools would be a fine run. At LSU it bought him nothing once the playoff appearances failed to materialize. He was fired on October 26, 2025, at 5–3, and the dataset puts the cost of that decision at $54 million.
3. James Franklin, Penn State: $49 million on paper
Franklin's is the strangest entry on the list because the résumé is genuinely good: a 104–45 tenure, bowl wins in the Fiesta and Cotton, a Rose Bowl appearance, and a 13–3 season in 2024 that ended in a College Football Playoff semifinal. Then 2025 opened 3–3, the losses included the kind that empty stadiums of patience, and Penn State fired him on October 12, 2025. The buyout in the data: $49 million — the sticker. The actual check came in far smaller: after Virginia Tech hired Franklin, Penn State's obligation was negotiated down to roughly $9 million. Add the top three stickers together and you get $179.8 million promised to three men to stop coaching.
4. Mark Stoops, Kentucky: $37,687,500
The most precise number on the list, and deliberately so: the dataset notes the figure comes from the official separation agreement, down to the last five hundred dollars. Stoops coached Kentucky for 13 seasons, the longest tenure anywhere near the top of this ranking, and turned a basketball school's afterthought into a program that won two Citrus Bowls. Longevity cuts both ways. Thirteen years of extensions is how a buyout gets to $37,687,500.
5. Jonathan Smith, Michigan State: $32.5 million
Two seasons. That is the whole tenure: 5–7 in 2024, 4–8 in 2025, a 9–15 on-field record, and a $32.5 million buyout when Michigan State fired him after the 2025 season. Divide it out and the school paid roughly $3.6 million per win for the experiment. No other entry on this list bought so little football for so much money.
6–10: the $15–21 million club
Gus Malzahn's Auburn exit cost $21.45 million in December 2020, after a 68–35 tenure that included playing for the 2013 national championship and winning the Sugar Bowl along the way. He was fired after a 6–4 season, which tells you where Auburn's patience line sits. Florida paid Billy Napier $21 million in October 2025 after a 22–23 tenure. Charlie Weis remains the old-school entry: Notre Dame's $18.9 million buyout, from a 35–27 tenure that ended in 2009, was the sport's cautionary tale for a decade, and it now ranks eighth. Florida State paid Willie Taggart $17 million less than two full seasons into a 9–12 tenure. And LSU paid Ed Orgeron $16.9 million in a separation announced in October 2021, less than two years after he coached a 15–0 national champion. Winning a title bought Orgeron about twenty months.
Auburn deserves its own paragraph
Count them up in the data and Auburn appears three times in the top fourteen buyouts: Malzahn at $21.45 million, Hugh Freeze at $15.8 million after a 15–19 tenure ended in November 2025, and Bryan Harsin at $15.3 million after going 9–12. That is $52.55 million in buyouts from one athletic department in five years, which is less a coaching search strategy than a subscription service.
What the list actually measures
A buyout is not really the price of failure. Plenty of coaches on this list won a lot of games. It is the price of a contract signed at the moment of maximum leverage, usually right after a good season or a flirtation with another job, when the school agrees that keeping the coach is worth any number. The number always comes due. The only question is whether it comes due at a retirement party or in a press release on a Sunday in October.
Think you can price these disasters on sight? Our game Buyout or Ballout shows you a coaching tenure season by season — the record, the bowls, the ending — and asks the only question that matters: was this man bought out, or did he ball out and leave on his own terms?