James Franklin getting ousted from Penn State shows there's no buyout too big in college football's modern era Dan WolkenOctober 13, 2025 at 3:58 AM 0 Let's just stop and think about what happened Sunday when Penn State fired James Franklin.
- - James Franklin getting ousted from Penn State shows there's no buyout too big in college football's modern era
Dan WolkenOctober 13, 2025 at 3:58 AM
0
Let's just stop and think about what happened Sunday when Penn State fired James Franklin.
We now live in a world where a program that reached the College Football Playoff semifinals last season, was an overtime play away from potentially being ranked No. 1 in the country two weeks ago and is pushing hard to stuff its pockets with private equity money because they've been left strapped by a $700 million stadium renovation project decided it could spend $50 million to get rid of coach with five top-10 finishes in the last nine years.
And it wasn't even all that surprising.
What a sport. What a business. What a mess.
Because while Franklin's sudden downfall is of course a football story of expectations and restlessness and a team that has wildly underperformed what it was supposed to be this season, it's more interesting to think about it as an economics story.
Jimbo Fisher's $76 million buyout from Texas A&M is no longer an anomaly, which crosses yet another rubicon in the narrative that a coach is too expensive to fire. We're learning that for a program the magnitude of Penn State, there doesn't seem to be any number that would prohibit them from getting rid of a coach it soured on.
But is that because it's prudent financial management? Or is it because in the Candyland world of college sports the decision-makers will always magically seem to find enough money to do what's necessary to keep the winning machine whirring?
James Franklin finishes with a record of 104-45 at Penn State. (Scott Taetsch/Getty Images) (Scott Taetsch via Getty Images)
Even if they have to get it from the University of California pension investment fund.
Are you watching, senators and congresspeople? When these schools cry poor, claim they're going to have to cut sports to pay the athletes what they're worth and beg for an antitrust exemption, are you going to naïvely believe them or laugh them out of the room?
Instead of giving them legal protections they don't deserve, perhaps you should make them show a little discipline first.
Here's a start: No more of these insane buyouts.
If the idea behind giving coaches almost unlimited financial security was that it would make schools more patient, that notion has clearly failed. And when you look at Texas A&M two years after firing Fisher and see a program that's now 6-0 and ranked No. 4 with fan engagement at an all-time high, how can you blame anyone else for trying to follow the same path?
But this is now just like pro sports, where the average tenures in the NBA and NFL are about 3-4 years.
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When you look at the impact of the transfer portal, spending $20 million a year on revenue sharing for athletes and the sport's new threshold for success with expansion to a 12-team College Football Playoff, this is no longer a world built for patience in building a program or decade-plus runs at one school.
For years, agents have browbeaten athletic directors and school presidents into signing off on these mega-contracts that extend out years and years, keep rolling over and have ridiculous amounts of guaranteed money.
Whenever you'd ask why schools were so willing to commit so much to coaches that they would quite possibly want to fire a few years later, the answer was usually a combination of recruiting and the scarcity of coaching talent. In other words, if you had a coach the fans liked at that particular moment, the threat of a coach taking another job over money left administrators exposed in terms of their own professional futures.
Smart agents took advantage of that weakness, which is how you end up with Mike Norvell signing an eight-year contract extension at Florida State worth more than $80 million because Alabama just so happened to come open after Norvell posted a 13-1 season.
None of that was necessary.
If Novell went to Alabama, so be it. Did the decision-makers there think he's the only coach in the country capable of winning an ACC title at freaking Florida State? Did Clemson really think Dabo Swinney was going to go somewhere else if they didn't give him a 10-year, $115 million contract in 2021? Does Georgia really feel like there's a threat of Kirby Smart leaving if they don't keep giving him more money and years?
This mentality needs to change because the entire sport has changed.
Right now, though, college football is caught in between the old mentality where the whole world revolves around the head coach and the new reality where you can change a program quickly by investing enough in a roster (ahem, Texas Tech).
Penn State is going to have to do both, it's going to be very expensive and that private equity money can't come fast enough.
But even as the industry becomes more and more professionalized, this churn of coaching buyouts regularly exceeding $40 and $50 million can't be what anyone has in mind as a sustainable way of doing business.
It's time for the tug of war between agents and administrators to get real and for schools to get a whole lot more comfortable saying one simple word.
No.
Source: "AOL Sports"
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