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NCAAF Brian Kelly Fired LSU fired Brian Kelly less than four years after introducing him with a 10-year, $95 million contract in 2021. Jonathan Bachman / Getty Images If a Division I campus can be likened to a shiny luxury car, there is no better time for a university president to take it out for a spin and show it off to the neighbors than an eventful Saturday in the fall. Tailgates. Marching bands. Fight songs sung by alumni and students as tens of thousands prepare to pack a stadium to support the most popular representative of their school — the football team. Advertisement If a president is lucky, the afternoon will be framed by blue skies and those fiery red, orange and yellow shades of autumn foliage gifted by chlorophyll-deprived trees. Participating in one of these days makes it easy to see how a school gets seduced into paying the gross domestic product of a small country to someone who helps the home team win far more than it loses. And why a governor of a football-mad state would announce that a sitting athletic director who just royally screwed up a hiring and firing will not be allowed to pick the next coach. Jeff Landry, governor of Louisiana, said he’d rather have President Trump choose Brian Kelly’s replacement at LSU than keep that decision in the hands of now-outgoing AD Scott Woodward, who gave Kelly a 10-year, $95 million deal to leave Notre Dame in 2021 before ousting him only three-plus seasons later and leaving LSU to negotiate a $54 million buyout bill. Landry also ripped Woodward, former AD at Texas A&M and now former AD at LSU, for giving Jimbo Fisher the 10-year, $75 million contract that led to a quickie extension (signed by a different AD), a predictable firing and the Rose Bowl of buyouts (the granddaddy of them all) in 2023: $76 million. The governor said he was “tired of rewarding failure in this country and then leaving the taxpayers to foot the bill. ” But this is not a cause for grandstanding politicians — it’s a fight for university administrators. They should take responsibility in an era of the run-amok Supercoach that needs to end now. They should finally answer the 2009 call of then-NCAA president Myles Brand, who responded to the eight-year, $32 million deal Kentucky handed basketball coach John Calipari (a pittance by today’s standards) by saying, “You have to ask some very hard questions, whether this is really in tune with the academic values (of higher education), whether we’ve reached a point already that these high salaries and packages for coaches has really extended beyond what’s expected within the academic community. ” Advertisement The late Brand was the Indiana University president who stood up to Bob Knight 25 years ago and canned him over his boorish behavior, angering thousands of students and supporters who marched on the president’s home and hung him in effigy. Brand was a reformer who walked the talk. In a 2001 speech at the National Press Club, he said his peers had to confront the rise of the celebrity coach, their ever-growing wages, external fan networks and the arms race waged to satisfy all of the above. “They must deal sometimes with entrenched coaches whose actions are not always in the best interests of the university, ” Brand said. “But I have great confidence in my colleague presidents, and I firmly believe that they are best positioned to effectively lead a reform movement to take back intercollegiate athletics. ” As it turns out, that reform movement was no more effective than Brian Kelly’s attempt at a Southern accent. As separation season barrels toward the $200 million mark for FBS football coaches terminated this year alone — with more firings and buyouts on deck — the right-minded response needs to start with self-examination. Just like with Jimbo at Texas A&M, Kelly and Penn State’s James Franklin (a $45 million severance package, subject to mitigation) didn’t sign themselves to absurd long-term contracts. And it wasn’t just the athletic directors like Woodward and Sandy Barbour acting in a vacuum while cutting those deals. When Barbour signed Franklin to his staggering 10-year, $75 million extension in November 2021, the terms were approved by the board of trustees’ subcommittee on compensation. “Penn State is very happy to offer this extension to coach Franklin, ” said the university president at the time, Eric J. Barron. Never mind that Franklin was finishing a 7-6 season that followed a shortened 4-5 season, or that he was 2-13 against top-10 opponents, or that USC’s and LSU’s interest in him was marginal — all signs that the magnitude of the commitment was unnecessary. Advertisement When Franklin was fired, the AD who succeeded Barbour, Pat Kraft, said Penn State owes the coach “an enormous amount of gratitude. ” And now an enormous amount of money. This isn’t a knock at Franklin, a coach with an impressive overall record. We all accept what people are willing to pay us. But where is the pushback from educators on these monster deals? After Woodward handed Kelly the crazy cash, then-LSU president William Tate called it “a historic moment” for the school, praised the new hire’s character and leadership traits and credited the AD for his analytical approach to the process. “I just thought, in my opinion, you were shooting for the 99th percentile from the beginning, ” Tate told Woodward. “And you hit the absolute top of this deal. ” Until the bottom fell out of it Sunday, a day after LSU got blown out by Texas A&M in the Buyout Bowl. Woodward’s decision to pay Kelly to not coach the Tigers was approved by interim president Matt Lee and the board of supervisors, even though it eventually cost Woodward his job. As in the Penn State case, why didn’t university leaders (and Gov. Landry) push the AD to work harder to find solutions that allowed Kelly to continue coaching at LSU rather than settling for the easy bailout? Aren’t educators supposed to be modeling the virtues of problem-solving to their students? Here’s a better question: Why make such a mammoth commitment to Kelly in the first place — despite all the victories on his resume — when his high-maintenance act stood in direct contrast to that of, say, his ultra-likable successor in South Bend, Marcus Freeman? Even at a time when the athletic departments of Ohio State and Alabama report huge financial losses, and when direct revenue sharing with athletes has raised concerns about costs, the guardians of higher education almost never say no when it’s time to go big-game hunting for a coach. Advertisement “Any university president who fights an athletic department in any way has a very short stay at that university, ” said Murray Sperber, former professor at Indiana and Cal and an author of several books on the excesses of college sports. An old foe of Bob Knight’s while they were together in Bloomington, Sperber described the $93 million Indiana just guaranteed its red-hot football coach, Curt Cignetti, “a ridiculous amount considering what professors are paid, even what university presidents are paid. ” In his 2000 book “Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education, ” Sperber wrote that an old subtitle of his, “The Athletic Department vs. The University, ” could someday morph into “The Athletic Department IS The University. ” That day has essentially arrived. “Just end the hypocrisy, ” Sperber said. “If a school wants to run a G League franchise, go ahead. ” With perpetual free agency via the transfer portal, along with revenue-sharing and name, image, and likeness payments, major college athletics now amount to a professional enterprise. Schools can pay their athletes up to this year’s cap of $20. 5 million, on top of what they earn with third-party deals approved through the NIL Go portal. That $20. 5 million equals 22 percent of revenues, while athletes in the four major professional sports are receiving around 50 percent of revenues. Of course, despite the fact that the players represent virtually the entire product at every level of competition, there’s no limit on what schools can pay the men and women who train them. “For decades, the NCAA, conferences, and universities have used the excuse that they can’t afford to pay the players, ” said Ramogi Huma, executive director of the National College Players Association. “Meanwhile, coaches have had no cap at all. The hypocrisy has just grown over time. Advertisement “These schools obviously have very deep pockets and have no problem gold-plating coaches’ salaries. I think there’s no justification whatsoever to restrict what players earn. … None of the other costs are capped — coaches’ salaries, stadium renovations, recruiting budgets. ” Huma and his advocacy group are not in the business of taking money out of the coaches’ pockets. On the other hand, they don’t want to hear the argument that player compensation could ultimately bankrupt the system. “All these buyouts, ” Huma said, “blow a hole through that argument. … The kicker is this money is paid out by universities that determined these coaches aren’t coaching well enough, so they have to get rid of them and pay them millions. But the athletes who are performing are prohibited from touching that same amount of money. ” Go watch any day-in-the-life TV piece on a big-time college athlete and absorb the nonstop blur of practices, meetings, weight-lifting sessions, team meals and more meetings. You’ll find yourself wondering how in the world these kids have time for classes and homework. It’s a full-time job, a tough one, before you ever get to the 12 to 15 credits per semester. Athletes deserve to be compensated fairly. So do coaches, within reason. These gluttonous mega-contracts have to go, no matter what agent that truth might piss off. Tens of millions of wasted dollars could be spent on so many more worthwhile pursuits. The traditional college student is expected to get the job done and earn a degree in four years, maybe five, depending on the circumstances. So college football coaches should get lucrative four-year contracts, with a fifth-year tacked on at a reasonable buyout price ($2 million? ) to help the coach and family transition to the next job if the school passes on a second four-year term. Advertisement If those numbers aren’t good enough for the marquee names, no problem. Plenty of qualified candidates will be desperate for the gig. Hire a younger, hungrier candidate and develop that coach into a star. But it’s going to take a brave Division I administrator to start a trend like that, a university president who actually cares about the core values cited in mission statements that so often get trampled in the red-zone rush for touchdowns. Who’s going to step up and take on that blitz? Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Ian O’Connor is a columnist for The Athletic. He is the author of six straight New York Times bestsellers. O’Connor was a columnist at various major outlets who earned multiple first-place finishes in contests run by the Society of Professional Journalists, Associated Press Sports Editors, Pro Football Writers of America, and Golf Writers Association of America. He is a proud former copy boy at The New York Times. Follow Ian on Twitter @Ian_OConnor