By Weston Blasi
LSU football coach Brian Kelly’s reported $54 million buyout ranks among the biggest of all time
Brian Kelly is out as LSU’s football coach. He’s still going to get a reported $54 million.
Louisiana State University fired head football coach Brian Kelly over the weekend, booting him the day after the LSU Tigers lost to Texas A&M and fell to 5-3 on the season. Kelly was just four years into a 10-year, $100 million contract with the team.
“When Coach Kelly arrived at LSU four years ago, we had high hopes that he would lead us to multiple [Southeastern Conference] and national championships during his time in Baton Rouge,” LSU’s athletic director, Scott Woodward, said in a statement. “Ultimately, the success at the level that LSU demands simply did not materialize.”
With Kelly’s firing, LSU will be on the hook to pay $54 million in buyout money, according to ESPN, although exact figures are still being negotiated.
“We will continue to negotiate his separation and will work toward a path that is better for both parties,” Woodward said.
The $54 million buyout would be the second biggest in college football history, behind only the estimated $76 million buyout for Florida State University’s Jimbo Fisher in 2023. Approximately $169 million in buyouts have already been given out in 2025, including an almost $50 million buyout for Penn State’s football coach just a couple of weeks ago.
These are the most expensive buyouts in college football so far this year, according to FrontOfficeSports and ESPN:
— Louisiana State University, Brian Kelly: $54 million
— Penn State University, James Franklin: $49.7 million
— University of Florida, Billy Napier: $21.2 million
— Oklahoma State University, Mike Gundy: $15 million
— University of Arkansas, Sam Pittman: $9.8 million
— University of California, Los Angeles, DeShaun Foster: $6.43 million
— Virginia Tech, Brent Pry: $6 million
— Oregon State University, Trent Bray: $4 million
— University of Alabama at Birmingham, Trent Dilfer: $2.4 million
Just a few weeks ago, Penn State fired head football coach James Franklin after the team started the season 3-3. The university agreed to give him a reported $49.7 million buyout.
Franklin signed a 10-year contract in 2021 that made him one of the highest-paid coaches in the country, but Penn State’s season got off to a much worse start than its No. 2 preseason ranking would have predicted. Penn State is now on the hook for an estimated $49 million or more left on Franklin’s contract.
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These buyouts illustrate a growing trend in college football: Schools give out big contracts to their football coaches in an effort to lure recruits and stay competitive, only to suffer buyer’s remorse when those coaches underperform or leave before finishing their contracts. In the 2022 and 2023 seasons alone, there were $146 million in buyouts among schools in the Power 5 conferences, according to ESPN.
Last year, buyouts for college football coaches amounted to about $36 million.
“It’s going to get worse,” Michael Leeds, professor of economics at Temple University, told MarketWatch about the possibility of more firings of college football coaches and subsequent buyouts this season.
College football has turned into big business. The top 14 schools’ football programs now make in excess of $100 million in annual revenue, most of it made in the College Football Playoff, the end-of-year tournament that crowns a national champion. The CFP TV deal is worth $1.3 billion a year, with some of that going to the conferences of the participating teams.
These financial incentives, plus the prestige of being a national champion, have created desperation among teams to find the best coaches out there. And the coaches considered the best are often the most expensive.
“There’s almost a gold-rush atmosphere in college football, where there’s ridiculous money coming in,” Leeds said. “With coaches, there’s an uncertain value of what you’re bidding on. The ‘winning bid’ is often well in excess of the value of the asset. It’s a bit of an auction market. Penn State ponied up.”
The need to win, and to win right away, appears to have made schools more willing to buy out millions of dollars’ worth of coaching contracts if they think it will help their team win faster.
Some estimates indicate it’s likely that the $169 million in coaching buyouts thus far in 2025 will continue to grow. There has been speculation about the job security of many high-profile coaches, including North Carolina’s Bill Belichick, with Stewart Mandel of The Athletic projecting a record-breaking $200 million in total buyouts by season’s end.
That would be enough to cover the scholarship costs of about 5,000 student-athletes.
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So who is paying these coaches all this money? Is it the school, or the school’s athletic department?
The Penn State athletic department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but its athletic director, Pat Kraft, addressed the question with the media.
“This is an athletics issue,” Kraft said when asked about the costs of Franklin’s buyout. “This is not the institution’s issue. We in athletics are covering all of the costs.”
But Leeds believes that while alumni and private sources like collectives could assist in paying part of the buyout, it may still impact the school indirectly. “[Penn State] can say this is not affecting the university or the state in any way. There’s an opportunity cost. Can an alumni chip in $10 million so we can fire James Franklin? That $10 million that’s not going to a new science building,” he said.
There are other costs for these schools to consider, too – like how such a buyout can hurt a team’s reputation. In instances where a public institution fires a coach and pays a large buyout, the fan optics can be even worse. That’s because public colleges are also eligible to receive some public funds. That was the case with Penn State and Florida State, both public universities and the schools with the two biggest contract buyouts for college football coaches in history. Penn State asked for, and was approved to receive, some $410.5 million in state appropriation funding for the 2026-27 year. Those funds are for the university as a whole, however, not just its athletics.
The Big Ten Conference, which Penn State is part of, is mostly made up of public colleges that are in talks to take on $2 billion in investments from a private-capital firm that would disperse the funds to the schools and their athletic departments. If a deal is made, the firm would get money back through annual profit or revenue distributions.
At the same time, universities have used the House v. NCAA settlement as a way to limit the earnings of college athletes. Not only that, commissioners of numerous Division I conferences have lobbied Congress to pass the Score Act, a bipartisan bill that would give colleges an antitrust exemption to avoid getting sued for limiting the earnings potential of athletes, and establish revenue-sharing legislation.
The Associated Press contributed.
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-Weston Blasi
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10-27-25 1418ET
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