Perhaps this is the year we stop being numb to the waste, to the GNP of small countries being spent on coaches not coaching. The year when buyout numbers north of $10 million are no longer merely eye-popping and instead become an impetus for rethinking the spending structure.
So far, through five full weeks of the college football season, jobs are opening at a never-before-seen rate. Power 5 schools Nebraska, Arizona State, Georgia Tech, Colorado and Wisconsin have already made changes. There's a chance both Auburn and Louisville end up joining them before Halloween.
Per terms of those contracts, the five jobs would have required paying out more than $60 million in dead money. Some of that will be lessened through negotiated buyouts, including at Wisconsin.
But the reality is the Monopoly money being thrown around shows how cutthroat the industry has become. And it's exactly why the presidents, boards and athletic directors handing out these deals need to start rethinking how they spend.
When the television deals head into the billions and the league payouts are approaching $70 million per team annually, patience for performance has gone the way of the neck roll. Schools can afford to make changes when the cash flows in regardless of results.
Consider Auburn, ever the picture of dysfunction, which will be committed to paying Bryan Harsin more than $15.5 million if he's fired this month, half of which is due within 30 days. That means Auburn will have committed nearly $37 million in two calendar years to former coaches, after paying Gus Malzahn $21.4 million after firing him in December 2020. (The tab for both sets of assistant coaches projects to be another $10 million.)
Nebraska, meanwhile, fired Scott Frost on Sept. 11, necessitating a $15 million buyout when that figure would have dropped in half on Oct. 1.
Can schools find creative ways to spend on players as opposed to burning millions for guys to sip Coronas in beach chairs? While blue bloods such as Alabama and USC aren't changing course, could there be a Moneyball formula that emerges to help downtrodden programs such as Georgia Tech, Arizona State, Nebraska or Colorado bounce back?
Some college football power brokers think so.
"I think there's a healthy reallocation of resources toward the players and less toward guaranteed contracts," a Power 5 athletic director told ESPN. "I don't know if that can happen overnight, but we could see it initially with assistant coaches and staffing."
Head-coaching salaries at established powers aren't going to go down significantly. There's such a thin marketplace for strong candidates that the guarantees on deals aren't likely to dip much, either. The big buyouts are an acknowledgement the coaches are in demand enough that they require long deals with big guarantees.
And the rise in early-season firings isn't going to change, either. Schools can gain a strategic advantage with a quick hook because it allows a new coach to come in and evaluate the roster. Being prepared to attack the transfer portal and December signing day is crucial, but perhaps even more important is a new coach recruiting his own roster to avoid a postseason exodus.
While poaching a current head coach would occur on the same end-of-season timeline, hiring an assistant or someone out of the game could provide a head start. Last year, Texas Tech (Joey McGuire), UConn (Jim Mora Jr.) and Georgia Southern (Clay Helton) made their head-coaching hires in November. All three schools are currently outperforming preseason expectations.
What change can be made? A reprioritization of where schools are asking their boosters to allocate money.
Instead of asking donors to pony up for the biggest-name coach on a big-money deal, they could look for them to spend that money on NIL deals. Mid-level Power 5 schools could look to find the next Sam Pittman, the Arkansas coach who wasn't atop anyone's list of hot candidates when he came to the Hogs at a reasonable cost and turned the program around.
An athletic director could bring in a high-energy young coach or a proven winner at the FCS level, and with the savings on salary, offer them assurances they'll have the resources to have flush rosters. High-end talent is required to win anywhere, and offering a coach better access to it would seemingly be the best possible recruiting technique.
"That would be a rational approach," said another Power 5 athletic director. "It may not win the press conference, but it would make a lot of sense. I'm skeptical that athletic directors would have that kind of discipline."
With rules changes opening the door for schools -- via collectives, of course -- to indirectly compensate players, it will be interesting to see if schools begin marshaling their resources differently. A school could look to divert a few million dollars that had previously been earmarked for staff salaries and put it toward players.
Schools can't do this directly. But if the money from the local car dealership or big donors is moved to the player recruitment and retention side via the collective, it could represent a paradigm shift. For example, could the extra money Nebraska used to get rid of Frost in September have been used to get NIL deals for a top junior quarterback or a few highly regarded defensive linemen?
Coaches are the biggest stars with the biggest salaries in college football. That's not going to change. But the infrastructure around them could. Instead of $300 million facilities -- which resonated more as a recruiting tactic in the pre-NIL days -- some of that money could be redirected to roster maintenance and management. Instead of $1 million defensive line coaches, could we see $400,000 defensive line coaches, with that extra cash being used on recruiting and retaining defensive linemen?
Rutgers coach Greg Schiano addressed this during the summer to a group of boosters, saying he'd delay the building of a new football facility to make sure the program's roster doesn't get raided. "We have four months to raise the money we need before other teams start poaching our best players," Schiano said, according to NJ.com.
Administrative failures at Colorado and Arizona State led in part to their rosters being gutted this year. Some of that can be attributed to players fleeing a sinking ship. But could a better NIL program have incentivized them to stick around?
Colorado lost star players Christian Gonzalez (Oregon), Mekhi Blackmon (USC) and Jarek Broussard (Michigan State). Arizona State lost Johnny Wilson (FSU), Jayden Daniels (LSU) and Eric Gentry (USC). Not only did Colorado and Arizona State make extraordinarily poor hires in Karl Dorrell and Herm Edwards, respectively, but the administrations did little as talent walked away and turned the schools into farm clubs.
College football is professional football now. Has been for a while. And there's no going back. The decisions made by athletic directors to burn money early this season shows that.
As this latest coaching cycle begins, it will be interesting to see which schools attempt to be creative and which ones follow the same old formula, cross their fingers and hope history doesn't repeat itself.