THE BOWL ELIGIBLE BLOG
Dead Money: Fired College Coaches Still Getting Paid
Our dataset records $538.4 million in buyouts across 25 fired coaches, and the payment schedules show some schools still writing checks years later.
Dead money is the portion of a payroll that buys a school absolutely nothing. In college football it has become a line item with its own gravitational pull. Our Buyout or Ballout dataset covers 61 coaching tenures. Thirty of them ended in a firing, and 25 of those firings have a buyout figure on record. Add them up and the recorded total is $538,437,500. Half a billion dollars, spent on coaches for the specific service of no longer coaching.
That total is a floor, not a ceiling. Five fired coaches in the dataset carry no figure at all: Charlie Strong at Texas, Clay Helton at USC, Mel Tucker at Michigan State, Pat Fitzgerald at Northwestern, and Dino Babers at Syracuse. Some of those involve private schools, disputed terms, or for-cause fights, which is precisely when the numbers stay dark. The real cost of firing coaches in this era is higher than any list can show. For the full ranking of what is on the record, see the biggest coaching buyouts in history.
The checks that keep clearing
The buyout headline is a single number, but the money rarely moves in a single payment. Dan Mullen's $12 million from Florida, agreed when he was fired in November 2021, was structured as $6 million within 30 days and then $1 million each July through 2027. Read that again: a coach fired in 2021 is on Florida's books into 2027. Ed Orgeron's $16.9 million from LSU was likewise set up in installments. Gene Chizik's $7.5 million from Auburn was paid monthly, and his school's total parting cost was $11.09 million once his assistants were included. Bryan Harsin's $15.3 million from Auburn was about 70 percent of what remained on his deal, with half of it due within 30 days. Firing a coach is not a transaction. It is a subscription that outlives the next hire, and sometimes the one after that.
Some schools negotiated their way out
The sticker price is not always the final price. James Franklin's buyout at Penn State was recorded at $49 million, the third-largest figure in the dataset. After Virginia Tech hired him, the obligation was negotiated down to about $9 million. Les Miles left LSU with a $12.9 million severance in 2016, but roughly $3.5 million of it was later relieved after he took the Kansas job, bringing the net cost near $9.4 million. Indiana handled Tom Allen's exit the other way: the recorded figure is $15.5 million, but the dataset notes that number itself was cut from $20.4 million in exchange for two faster payments of $7.75 million each. Schools pay premiums for speed and discounts for patience, same as everyone else.
The extreme case is a settlement rather than a buyout at all. Art Briles's Baylor exit is recorded at $15.1 million, a figure the dataset sources to Baylor's IRS tax filings, against about $39 million left on his deal. Baylor paid roughly forty cents on the dollar to end it, which is what leverage looks like when a school believes it has cause and a coach knows a court fight helps nobody. And then there is the loyalty discount that never came: Mike Gundy coached Oklahoma State for 21 seasons, went 170–90, and was fired three games into 2025 with a flat $15 million guarantee waiting for him. Two decades of service bought Oklahoma State no discount at all.
The repeat customers
Only one coach in the dataset got bought out twice. Will Muschamp collected $6.3 million from Florida in 2014 and $12.9 million from South Carolina in 2020, a combined $19.2 million in recorded buyouts, which is more than all but seven of the single firings in the data. He turned being fired into a recurring revenue stream.
The schools repeat, too. LSU's three recorded buyouts (Brian Kelly at $54 million, Orgeron at $16.9 million, Miles at $12.9 million) total $83.8 million. Texas A&M's two (Jimbo Fisher at $76.8 million, Kevin Sumlin at $10.4 million) total $87.2 million. Auburn has four entries in the data, from Chizik's $7.5 million in 2012 through Hugh Freeze's $15.8 million in 2025, totaling $60.05 million across thirteen years of changing its mind.
Why this keeps happening
None of these payments were accidents. Each one was agreed to on the day the coach signed an extension, usually after a good season, when the school's fear of losing him was at its peak. The buyout is the price of that fear, deferred. The dataset's strangest detail might be Scott Frost's: his Nebraska buyout sat at $15 million in September 2022 and was scheduled to drop to $7.5 million on October 1 of that year. Nebraska fired him in September anyway and paid the higher number. Even patience, it turns out, has a price, and it was $7.5 million for about three weeks of it.
Want to test your instincts for which tenures ended in a payout? Buyout or Ballout walks you through a tenure season by season and asks whether the coach was bought out or left on his own terms. The dead money is harder to spot than you would think.