THE BOWL ELIGIBLE BLOG
The Cheapest Power Conference Coach Buyouts in 2026
Hawaii's Timmy Chang owns the cheapest sourced buyout in the file at $57,576, while the lowest Power conference figure is still $7.6 million.
The cheapest sourced buyout in our entire 138-coach file is not in a Power conference. It belongs to Hawaii's Timmy Chang: $57,576, as of December 1, 2025. That is not a typo, and it is not a weekly salary. It is the school-owes figure carried in the CSV from the USA Today database. There is a necessary caveat: the row notes that Chang later signed a five-year extension through January 2031, and no post-extension buyout is given in the file. So $57,576 is a sourced December snapshot, not a promise that the number survived the new deal. Even with that warning, it is the perfect entry point for this list because it shows how absurd the range has become.
The next-cheapest sourced figures are also outside the Power conferences: Akron's Joe Moorhead at $664,063, Old Dominion's Ricky Rahne at $687,886, and Louisiana Tech's Sonny Cumbie at $875,000, all dated December 1, 2025. Chang's figure is still less than one-tenth of Moorhead's. Then the Power conferences arrive, and the word "cheap" changes meaning.
For this ranking, Power conference means the SEC, Big Ten, ACC, and Big 12, using the conference labels in the CSV. Fifty of the 67 Power conference coaches in the file have a sourced school-owes buyout. Seventeen are blank. This is therefore a ranking of published figures, not a secret claim about contracts nobody can see.
| Rank | Coach | School | Conference | Buyout in file | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pat Narduzzi | Pittsburgh | ACC | $7,600,000 | Dec. 1, 2025 |
| 2 | Rich Rodriguez | West Virginia | Big 12 | $7,645,833 | Dec. 1, 2025 |
| 3 | Jeff Lebby | Mississippi State | SEC | $11,006,250 | Dec. 1, 2025 |
| 4 | Brent Key | Georgia Tech | ACC | $11,123,333 | Dec. 1, 2025 |
| 5 | Tony Elliott | Virginia | ACC | $11,175,000 | Dec. 1, 2025 |
| 6 | Scott Satterfield | Cincinnati | Big 12 | $12,008,333 | Dec. 1, 2025 |
| 7 | Eric Morris | Oklahoma State | Big 12 | $12,600,000 | 2026 |
| 8 | Collin Klein | Kansas State | Big 12 | $13,050,000 | After 2026 season |
| 9 | Dave Doeren | NC State | ACC | $13,129,456 | Dec. 1, 2025 |
| 10 | Dave Aranda | Baylor | Big 12 | $13,300,000 | 2026 |
| 11 | Scott Frost | UCF | Big 12 | $13,793,750 | Dec. 1, 2025 |
| 12 | Jimmy Rogers | Iowa State | Big 12 | $15,500,000 | 2026 |
| 13 | Morgan Scalley | Utah | Big 12 | $16,700,000 | 2026 |
| 14 | Bob Chesney | UCLA | Big Ten | $17,300,000 | 2026 |
| 15 | Lance Leipold | Kansas | Big 12 | $17,900,000 | Dec. 1, 2026 |
Cheap is a relative term
Pittsburgh's Pat Narduzzi and West Virginia's Rich Rodriguez are separated by only $45,833. After them, the list jumps by more than $3.36 million to Jeff Lebby. Narduzzi's $7,600,000 still needs the file's caution: it is single-sourced, and the research notes say a USA Today summary table did not show a Pitt buyout. We kept the CSV figure because this ranking is built from the CSV, but it should be quoted with less confidence than the exact public-school figures around it.
Rodriguez is a different kind of entry. He started his second West Virginia stint in 2025, so a low buyout at the start of a deal does not carry the same meaning as a low buyout for Narduzzi, who started at Pitt in 2015, or Dave Doeren, who started at NC State in 2013. Several names on the table, including Eric Morris, Collin Klein, Jimmy Rogers, Morgan Scalley, and Bob Chesney, started in 2026. Their presence tells you about contract structure and timing. It is not a hot-seat prediction. If you want the contract mechanics behind that distinction, read how coach buyouts work alongside this list, not instead of reading the dates.
Dave Aranda's $13,300,000 requires its own footnote. Baylor is private, and the file calls the figure a derived estimate. Published estimates in the research notes range from about $12 million to $15 million to $20 million. At the low end he would sit sixth on this table; at the high end he would fall off it. The CSV uses about $13.3 million, so that is where he ranks here, with the error bars left visible.
The gap is the story
Take the two ends of the sport seriously for a second. Pitt's $7,600,000 is almost exactly 132 times Chang's $57,576. Georgia's Kirby Smart, at $105,107,583 in the same file, is more than 1,800 times Chang's December figure. These are not just different budgets. They are different sports living under the same FBS label.
That spread also explains why the blank cells matter. A Power conference ranking with only sourced figures excludes private-school coaches and several 2026 hires whose schools published percentages instead of totals. One of those unpublished contracts could be lower than $7.6 million, and this list cannot prove otherwise. What it can prove is the floor among the figures that are actually on record.
The historical list is full of schools learning that a buyout becomes real at the worst possible moment. This list is the before picture. Some of these coaches will win and make the number irrelevant. Some will lose and discover that even the cheapest Power conference exit starts at $7.6 million before staff payouts and the next search join the bill. The game version is cleaner: play Buyout or Ballout, then compare the current numbers with the biggest buyouts in history and the coaches still collecting in our dead money ranking.