USA TODAY National
On the Tuesday, November 11, 2025 episode of The Excerpt podcast: As tuition climbs, some public schools are shelling out fortunes to fired college football coaches. Huh? USA TODAY Senior National College Football Writer Matt Hayes and USA TODAY Sports Project Reporter Steve “Berk” Berkowitz join USA TODAY’s The Excerpt to dig into some of the biggest buyouts this season.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
College football season this year is different. How so? It's not just the breakout success of Indiana's Hoosiers and the crushing disappointment of Penn State, although both are noteworthy development. It's the golden parachutes being doled out to bad coaches from public schools.
Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Tuesday, November 4th, 2025. Some of the biggest parachutes we've seen so far this year include Penn State's payout to coach James Franklin to the tune of $49 million. We also have another big payout to Brian Kelly at LSU. So far across the country, we're looking at millions in go away payments for failing college football coaches from public colleges, colleges where many students continue to take on exorbitant debt to earn a degree. Is this okay? Here to help me dig into all of it is USA TODAY's senior national college football writer, Matt Hayes, and USA TODAY's sports project reporter, Steve "Berk" Berkowitz. Matt and Berk, thank you for hopping on.
Steve "Berk" Berkowitz:
Thanks for having us on.
Matt Hayes:
Thanks for having us.
Dana Taylor:
Steve, let's start with these two big payouts. Is the Brian Kelly payout the largest payout for a failing college football coach ever?
Steve "Berk" Berkowitz:
No, actually there's one that's larger. It was the amount that Texas A&M paid to Jimbo Fisher several years ago, which was roughly 75 to $77 million.
Dana Taylor:
Matt, just for kicks, I wanted to see how Franklin's $49 million package might impact Penn State's undergraduate population with just over 48,000 right now. If it was divvied out among the students instead of all going to James Franklin, it would net $1,000 per student. Are there ethical lines being crossed here?
Matt Hayes:
I think when you start talking about paying coaches a lot of money to coach football, and then you start getting into, well, these teams, when they win big, they place the university on a higher pedestal, which means you get more students coming to the school. You get more boosters giving money to the school. You get more grants. It's all this stuff that they believe is the impact of the front porch of sports, which is football and the sport that makes the most money and generates the most money.
For me, looking at it, I think sports-wise from football, this is the sport that generates the revenue. This is the sport far and away more than any other sport on a college campus. There are many, many university presidents and obviously athletic directors who believe that it transcends sports, that it becomes an issue for the university to use as a tool to get any number of things that they couldn't get without it.
Dana Taylor:
Okay. Steve, let's talk about where this golden parachute money is coming from then. Are there donations that are earmarked for this or is it coming from revenue earned by the sports teams?
Steve "Berk" Berkowitz:
It's probably a combination of both. I mean, there are instances in which athletic directors hear from donors that they want the football coach to be fired and the donors help put up the money for that specific purpose. There are other instances where athletics departments use reserve funds that they've built up over the years where they've had surpluses of revenue over expenses. There are a variety of different ways for schools to deal with this.
The thing to keep in mind on a taxpayer basis is that the entirety of the college sports and higher education ecosystem is underpinned on those all being nonprofit tax-exempt organizations. The schools are tax-exempt. Donations to the schools provide people with tax deductions. The NCAA is operating as a nonprofit. All of the conferences operate as nonprofits. Many of the bowl games that are organized, those are operating as nonprofits. All of this revenue and all of the money that's washing around to this system is tax sheltered and tax advantaged, which means that on a certain level, taxpayers are underwriting this across the board.
Matt Hayes:
Steve and I have also talked about this. It's almost as if this money is fungible because it just goes from one place to another place to another place. At the end of the day, you don't know where it is. The fear, I guess, for some university personnel is if you've got a big booster who's willing to put up $25 million to be part of a buyout for a coach who's not winning, why can't he give $25 million to the school of journalism? Why can't he give $25 million to other research being done at the university, or if he's doing that, that's taking away from the money he would be giving to other research situations away from sports.
Dana Taylor:
Matt, I'm going to circle back to something you just talked about, how these coaches are able to negotiate these incredible deals with public schools, high risk, high reward situations. What are the stakes though for the schools?
Matt Hayes:
I mean, they're big. There's no doubt about it because there's so much money now involved. If you look at the two super conferences, the Big Ten and the SEC, which make considerably more money than the other conferences, you're talking about the Big 10, I believe is somewhere in the 70 million mark they gave each school this past year. Berk would know the numbers better than I do. I think the SEC is right around the low to mid 50 millions. Then, now, you're also talking about the college football playoff, which they're going to expand. Right now, they get annually about 1.2 billion, with a B, annually for that playoff. When it expands, it will be more. So you're talking about a lot of money annually being doled out to these schools.
If you have a coach who's not winning and can't get you into that playoff, then you got to reassess and start to think, okay, is it worth us paying that kind of money? You and I, Dana look at that and Berk, and we look at this and we think $50 million to sit at home and do nothing. You got to be kidding me. How do I get that job? Look at what they've done. Look at what Penn State did. Penn State was a play away from playing for the national championship last year. Six games into this season, they fire their coach. It's remarkable what Penn State has done. Remarkable. LSU is similar, but Brian Kelly was going bad there at LSU. Billy Napier, who got 22 million at Florida. He just couldn't get it going in his four years.
You can understand those firings. The buyouts clearly is still just shocking, but we're at the point now, honestly, Dana, where 20 million is like, all right,. So, and then, Nebraska, because it was worried that Penn State was going to steal its coach, extended Matt Rule two more years for 25 million total. This is a coach who's 18 and 15 at Nebraska, who has a losing record against power conference teams, who has not beaten a ranked team in three years at Nebraska, whose teams are one in seven in the month of November when it really matters most. Right now, his six and two team, if they follow the path of what his two previous teams did in November, they could have given a guy a $25 million extension for a seven and five record or six and six record. It's ridiculous at this point.
Dana Taylor:
Berk, what's your take on this, on the stakes for the schools?
Steve "Berk" Berkowitz:
I mean, the states for the schools, like Matt said, are gigantic. I mean, and the amounts of money that are involved here are considerable. When you're like at a school, for example, like at Tennessee, you go like, "Well, at Tennessee's football stadium seat it's roughly 100,000 people. " If you draw 80,000 people for a football game at Tennessee, you go like, "Wow, that's a really big crowd." Well, at Tennessee, the incremental difference between having 80,000 people in the building and 100,000 people in the building, when even if those tickets are paid for, people don't show up, there's a huge economic impact in terms of the number of tee shirts that they're selling and sodas that are being sold and lots of other things that are going on there.
There was a research group at the University of Wisconsin that recently released a report that was written about by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that tried to quantify the economic impact in the Madison area of the team not playing well. These were findings that were not accepted by the athletics department, but they talked about the overall economic impact just on the local area. The stakes on these things are huge and they're enormous. The amounts of money that schools put into their athletics programs, which again, like Matt said, money is fungible. The school putting money in for one place that's ostensible purpose is one thing, means that they don't have to spend the revenue that they get from tickets on something else.
There are schools in the power conferences where the institution is putting $20 million or more into the athletics program every year to help fund the operations. University of Colorado, which is what we focused on in this year's main story about coaches' pay, has been putting in over $20 million each of the past two years to help fund the entirety of the athletics program. After last season, they gave Dion Sanders a raise that took his pay from 5.9 million to $10 million annualized. Obviously, the University of Colorado thinks this is pretty important.
Dana Taylor:
Matt, have there been any rumblings from the other students at these public universities about these firings?
Matt Hayes:
Oh, I'm sure there has. I'm sure there has. I'm sure there are students on campus that are wondering why you're paying a guy $50 million to not coach. Of course. How could you not? If I was on campus back in the day and when I'm on campus, if a coach would've gotten fired and that would've been the situation, I'd have been like, "You got to be kidding me. We're using these old computers here in the journalism school and you can't use some of that money to get us some new computers?" Of course, I absolutely could see that. I don't know that it's to the point, Dana, where there's going to be some kind of revolt or some kind of sit-in or anything like that. I think they're just kind of like, "Okay, this is weird. This is how the world works and I don't like it, but I guess if we want a winning team, this is the cost of doing business." At the end of the day, it's that old world, that old cliche, the cost of doing business is what is running this mill right now.
Steve "Berk" Berkowitz:
There is unhappiness about some of this stuff with members of faculty. I mean, again, going back to the story that Brent Schrotenboer and our staff did primarily around Dion Sanders, the school has told the faculty that they need to be prepared for belt tightening. There's a lot of instability in what's going on with federal and state support of colleges and universities. A lot of these schools are staring at declining enrollments, so money is tight on college campuses. Then, at the same time, you have coaches who are making eight million, 10 million, and then getting these kinds of buyouts to not coach. That creates a certain level of incongruity on those campuses.
Now, whether the faculty has influence or students or their parents who are paying those bills have influence, I mean, there are schools that charge student athletic fees that are mandatory that build into the cost of you attending school that affect the amount of money you're having to borrow to go to school. I mean, all of these things are a piece of the puzzle in this overall environment. Whether anybody being unhappy enough about it to disrupt it, that remains to be seen.
Dana Taylor:
Finally, I want to ask you both as experts in covering college football, what surprised you the most about these stories? Matt, I'll start with you.
Matt Hayes:
Honestly, Dana, nothing. Absolutely nothing. That might be the most surprising thing of all because I see where this is headed. We've all seen where this is headed. In 2021, when the NCAA decided that not only were they going to allow students to earn off their name, image and likeness, which I think should have been done a long time ago, but they did it with zero guardrails. They did it knowing that the states of California and Florida started out 16 months earlier saying, "Look, in July of 2021, our student athletes are going to be able to earn off their name image and likeness." The NCAA knew for 16 months this was going to happen and had zero guardrails.
What did they do? Not only did they allow NIL, they also said, "What the heck? We'll just open it up and we'll have free player movement." Then, everybody started to complain about it, shocking that everyone's complaining about something that was set up. They knew that they had to do something and they did nothing, which is really the MO for the NCAA. Am I surprised? Not in the least.
Steve "Berk" Berkowitz:
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, there's nothing surprising about this. I'll take it this in a slightly different direction. I mean, because with doing this work for USA TODAY, going back to 2006 when we first started doing looks at college football coaches' compensation, people have always asked me, "Is there a ceiling to what college football coaches can get paid?" Is the idea of athletes getting paid, is that going to constitute a drag or some kind of a governor on what college football coaches are paid? And I've yet to see evidence of anything that will constitute a drag on coaches' salaries. In the upcoming year, the Indiana University just gave a huge raise to its coach, Kurt Signetti, who's been incredibly successful in a very short period of time. With Indiana now talking about Indiana and Signetti have agreed to an arrangement under which he'll be paid a little over $11 million beginning next season and it'll go up from there.
Because there's so much emotion involved in these decisions and there's such an interest in winning that somebody's always going to think, "Hey, if we pay the money, we'll get the best guy and that's the guy who's going to win us a national championship," or, "That's the coach that's going to get us farther in football than we've ever gotten before, then that's what we're going to do," and that's what's going to happen.
Dana Taylor:
Love talking to you both. Matt and Steve, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
Matt Hayes:
Thank you, Dana.
Steve "Berk" Berkowitz:
Thanks.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, for her production assistance. Our executive producer's Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts at usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Golden parachutes for failed college football coaches become the norm | The Excerpt
Reporting by Dana Taylor, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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