Sometime late Monday night, Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh and Washington’s Kalen DeBoer will meet at midfield of Houston’s NRG Stadium for the customary postgame handshake as cameras swarm for a shot of college football’s national champion head coach.
Harbaugh, one of the sport’s most recognizable and well-paid coaches, earned more than $8 million in salary for the 2023 season and already has secured $2 million in bonuses. DeBoer, completing his second year as a power-conference coach with a face most fans couldn’t pick out of a lineup, earned roughly $4.2 million.
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Good work if you can get it, though the latter is a bargain considering the heights to which DeBoer has led the Huskies and compared to what his highest-paid counterparts rake in. But that gap won’t last much longer. Win or lose on Monday, DeBoer is about to receive a significant raise and contract extension.
This is the new normal in college football: An impressive (or even promising) season by a head coach equals getting poached for a new, higher-paying job or incentivized with an extension to stay put. The more successful coaches can increasingly command longer and more lucrative contracts; Harbaugh is sitting on a contract extension from Michigan as he considers a return to the NFL next season and leaving the NCAA investigations behind. But it doesn’t take reaching the title game to cash in, either.
“Look, if you have the right person and you believe in them and you have the means,” Texas A&M athletic director Ross Bjork said, “you’re going to have a contract that speaks to that.”
Bjork is well-versed in this realm, just two months removed from Texas A&M paying a record $77 million buyout to fire Jimbo Fisher amidst a 10-year, fully guaranteed deal. But rather than serving as a deterrent to preposterous coaching contracts, Fisher’s historic buyout is instead more indicative of where the industry is headed.
Money talks in college football, where wealthy boosters still hold inordinate sway, and media deals for conference television rights and the College Football Playoff have sent athletics revenues skyrocketing. Coaching contracts have arguably been influenced the most by those windfalls.
Because in college football, a sport where the players inherently cycle through, a good head coach is worth his weight in gold.
“In the NFL, it’s mostly about the players. If you have the best quarterback and best players, you win,” said a source with experience negotiating coaching contracts on behalf of universities who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But in college football, there is nothing more important than getting the right coach.”
College coaches — and their agents — know this. It’s why the best ones leverage 10-win seasons and recruiting momentum into higher salaries and additional years, fueling the sport’s growing trend of favorable and one-sided deals. In January 2007, Alabama gave Nick Saban an eight-year, $32 million, fully guaranteed contract to woo him away from the Miami Dolphins and the NFL, making him the sport’s highest-paid coach. Less than two decades later, more than 50 Division I coaches have annual salaries over $4 million. Saban, who has won six national titles since 2007, still topped that list at $11.4 million in 2023.
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Roughly a dozen head coaches earn more than $8 million annually. And while it makes sense to pay Saban or Georgia’s two-time national champion head coach Kirby Smart upwards of $10 million a year, it sets the curve and heightens the sense of urgency for everyone else.
Any degree of success — no matter how fleeting — will cost a university. But it beats the alternative: firing a coach who’s under contract and having to pay the potentially costly buyout.
“Losing is really expensive. Really expensive,” said Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. “So when you think you’ve got the right guy, they have a lot of leverage, because you can’t afford to lose.”
Exorbitant as these contracts have become, the explanation is simple.
“People will argue there is no position in sports with as much responsibility as a college football head coach,” said longtime sports agent Leigh Steinberg. “That job is incredibly complex.”
By comparison, most NFL franchises have a general manager and front office tasked with constructing the roster, and star players are the ones inking record-breaking deals. A college head coach, however, is often the lead evaluator, recruiter and developer of talent, the chief arbiter and face of a program where the rosters turn over yearly.
“There are a small number of college coaches in that elite category,” said the source. “If you have one, you’re probably going to win. But that also lifts up the bottom of the market.”
It’s why blue bloods like LSU and USC paid top dollar to poach proven commodities in Brian Kelly and Lincoln Riley, respectively. Kelly signed a 10-year, $95 million deal with LSU to leave Notre Dame ahead of the 2022 season; USC courted Riley away from Oklahoma that same offseason with an annual salary estimated at roughly $10 million. (USC is a private institution and contract details aren’t publicly available.)
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It all trickles down. Penn State’s James Franklin, rumored to be a candidate for the USC job in 2021, signed a 10-year extension that November worth $70 million guaranteed. The Sooners gave Brent Venables, a first-time head coach, a six-year, $43.5 million, fully guaranteed deal to replace Riley.
At Tennessee, Josh Heupel went from $5 million a year to $9 million after he revived the Volunteers to 11 wins in his second season, raising his buyout to more than $46 million. Oregon paid Dan Lanning $4.7 million as a first-year head coach in 2022; he’s already been extended twice and made $8.2 million in 2023.
The threshold is different for each school and each offseason, as well. In December 2022, after an 8-5 season for Illinois — the program’s most wins in 15 years — Bret Bielema signed a six-year extension that took him from $4.3 million to an average of $6.4 million, and a buyout north of $35 million. The Illini went 5-7 in 2023.
Other schools will pay for faith and potential. In November 2022, Missouri gave Eli Drinkwitz a two-year extension amid a second straight 6-7 season, bumping his annual salary from $4 million to $6 million. It registered as a curious, unnecessary decision for a program that seemed to be negotiating against itself.
Thirteen months later, Drinkwitz and the Tigers completed an 11-2, top-10 season, capped by a win over Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl. The following day, Missouri announced another extension for Drinkwitz, which includes a raise that puts him in the “upper echelon of SEC head coach salaries,” according to a university press release.
No one’s scratching their head this time around.
“Every winning coach is usually underpaid and every losing coach is overpaid,” said Swarbrick, who will retire as AD of Notre Dame this year.
The salaries are one thing, though even elite college coaches make similar to or less than most NFL head coaches. Which makes sense; there are only 32 NFL franchises and 130-plus FBS programs, about half at the power-conference level. Yet it’s the top college coaches who tend to sign the longer deals. That’s partly because the NFL has rigid anti-tampering rules, which bar head coaches from taking a job with another NFL team during the season and require franchises to ask permission to negotiate with a sitting head coach during the offseason.
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Yet with virtually no restrictions or overarching governance at the college level, a university’s best option is often to add more years to the offer.
The introduction of name, image and likeness earnings for college athletes in 2021 factors into this equation, though thus far, that seems to be having a bigger impact on fundraising. And the coaches still have, by far, the richest paydays. Perhaps this changes if players are eventually compensated directly by schools or given a share of media revenue, which seems inevitable in light of the NCAA’s recent subdivision proposal. But that likely will get decided by the courts or Congress and could still take years to sort out.
When coaching salaries and years increase, so do buyouts. At least on one side. The word “buyout” applies to two numbers: how much it costs for a university to fire the coach (without cause) before the end of the deal, and how much a coach owes the university for taking another job before the end of the deal. Traditionally, those numbers have been represented by a descending percentage of the coach’s remaining salary as the deal ages. But as the most coveted coaches negotiate higher salaries and more years, they are empowered to do the same for the amount of guaranteed money.
“Everybody wants to say, ‘We’ve got our person. We’ve got our coach, and he’s here to stay,’ versus saying, ‘Hey, nothing lasts forever,’” said Bjork, who extended Fisher’s contract at A&M in 2021 to 10 years, $95 million, fully guaranteed. “It’s almost like we’ve set up a built-in insecurity, which leads to long-form contracts that are 10 years, fully guaranteed.”
Fisher’s $77 million buyout broke the mold. Before his dismissal, Gus Malzahn’s $21.7 million buyout from Auburn in 2020 was the highest known mark in the sport. Entering the 2023 season, more than a dozen head coaches had publicly available buyouts that exceeded $40 million, Fisher included. Another new normal.
Coming off the first of his back-to-back national championships at Georgia, Smart signed a 10-year, $112.5 million extension in August 2022 that is fully guaranteed through the end of 2026, then pays out at 85 percent of the remaining total through 2031. The buyout in Smart’s previous extension with Georgia, signed in May 2018, was guaranteed at 65 percent.
“It’s been like a 25-year bull market,” said Gary O’Hagan, an agent for two-plus decades. “It’s gone straight up.”
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And the second buyout number? If a coach wants to leave for a new job, they’ll usually have a much easier time of it. If Smart were to resign from Georgia before the end of 2024, for instance, he would owe the university just $5 million.
The coaches (and their agents) clearly hold the reins, but athletic directors and university power brokers have some recourse in these negotiations. Most contracts contain language regarding “for cause” firings and mitigation clauses. And while no school or AD makes a hire assuming it won’t work out, they also know that if it doesn’t, they can afford to pay the buyout. Rarely will these contracts reach the end of their term. If a coach wins, he’ll either keep getting extensions or take a job elsewhere. If he doesn’t, he’s getting canned in a few years, tops.
At Texas A&M, enough stakeholders determined it was in the school’s best interest — competitively and financially — to pay the buyout and move on rather than wait out a more tolerable severance figure. The Aggies were willing to pay $77 million to admit they were wrong.
“You always convince yourself there’s only one, that you found the only right person for the job,” Swarbrick said. “And of course, that may be the case. It may not. You don’t really know.”
In College Station, Texas, that burden now falls to Mike Elko, whom A&M hired away from Duke with a six-year deal worth $7 million in annual salary. At Elko’s introductory news conference in November, the university distributed details of the contract, including the fact that 75-80 percent of the contract is guaranteed, depending on when A&M might elect to fire Elko without cause, and the existence of a mitigation clause — stipulations that were notably absent from Fisher’s contract.
It was a similar story at Michigan State, which hired Jonathan Smith away from Oregon State for $7.25 million annually, with non-guaranteed performance incentives and 85 percent of the seven-year deal guaranteed. This after the Spartans fired Mel Tucker for cause in September, sending the fate of a 10-year, fully guaranteed contract worth $95 million into the claws of the legal system.
On the surface, both hires signaled lessons learned by the respective administrations, right down to A&M’s term-sheet transparency. A Sunday repentance for Saturday sins. But with the Playoff field expanding to 12 teams in 2024, there will be even more opportunities for coaches to justify those multi-year, multi-million-dollar extensions, Elko and Smith included. Fisher and Tucker were harbingers, not warning signs.
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“There doesn’t seem to be much consequence for (those decisions), right?” Swarbrick said. “I mean, schools just march forward. So I don’t see any momentum slowing them down.”
Meanwhile, Washington will happily deliver a big raise to DeBoer in the near future, barely two years after it plucked the anonymous South Dakota native away from Fresno State with a shrewd five-year, $16.5 million deal.
Every school is seeking that coach who can lead the program to glory.
The next Kalen DeBoer is out there.
— The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman, Christopher Kamrani and David Ubben contributed to this report.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Kevin C. Cox, Michael Hickey, Alika Jenner, Ken Murray / Getty Images)
