Doyel: College football is big business. So big buyouts be damned if you want to keep up.
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Wisconsin fired Paul Chryst on Sunday, fired him five games into the 2022 college football season, fired him with a career record of 67-26. Just sent him packing, humiliated the former Wisconsin quarterback, as if his previous seven seasons — all ending in bowl games, the Badgers winning six of those — hadn’t happened.
This is where college football has gone. Into the dumper, into the land of toxic make-believe.
Into the SEC.
Trees aren’t even shedding leaves yet, and already five Power 5 schools have shed their head football coach. Wisconsin on Sunday joined Nebraska (Scott Frost), Arizona State (Herm Edwards), Georgia Tech (Geoff Collins) and Colorado (Karl Dorrell), firings that will cost those schools more than $50 million in buyouts. All five are public schools. The money comes from somewhere, a shell game of shady boosters in the background writing checks, money diverted from more noble potential causes. Cleaning up a landfill, for example.
Big Bucks, Big Buyouts: Big Ten schools spent nearly $150 million to buy out coaches
This is happening because college football is a huge game of follow-the-leader, which is to say: Follow the money. The real money is in the SEC, though the Big Ten has emerged as the clear No. 2 conference in college football, which helps explain why two Big Ten schools already have fired a coach. Can’t keep up with the SEC by standing still.
The Pac-12 is fighting for its life, already raided by the Big Ten for USC and UCLA, which helps explain why two Pac-12 schools also have fired two coaches already. The ACC is fighting with the Pac-12 for No. 3 on the pecking order, but firing just one coach before October won’t get it done, ACC.
As for you, Big 12? You’re the suckers, the nice guy finishing last. Nobody in the Big 12 fired its coach yet, but the situation is more dire than that. Where do you think Wisconsin, Nebraska, Arizona State and Co. will go their next coach? Well, Kansas’ Lance Leipold looks good. So does Matt Campbell of Iowa State. Expect both to be offered upwards of $100 million — the going rate, now, for a great college football coach — to change schools this offseason.
This feels like shaking a fist at clouds, damn them, wanting them to get out of the way so the sun can shine, knowing full well college football has been cloudy for decades and the forecast looks worse next week. In the past, at least, the bagmen were shadowy figures we could pretend didn’t exist, or pretend existed only at other schools, not ours.
Now the bagmen are school presidents and athletic directors, boards of trustees, even alumni with names on campus buildings. It’s all out in the open now, paying players through NIL-prompted “collectives,” schools like Texas and Texas A&M purchasing recruits legally, apparently, and other schools trying to keep up with their own collectives.
The “Horns with Heart” collective at the University of Texas has this wonderful little self-description on its website, saying it is “leveraging student-athlete Name Image and Likeness to make a difference for charities and organizations which help the world and people in it.”
I’ll say this: Horns for Heart is making a difference in the lives of Texas’ 16 offensive linemen on full scholarship, paying each one $50,000 a year. I bet some of those linemen do some really nice things. I bet the Texas coaching staff finds it easy to recruit offensive linemen, too. A quick check of the recruiting rankings at ESPN.com shows Texas has commitments from four of the top 43 offensive linemen in the Class of 2023.
Imagine that.
The money is gushing now, ESPN and other networks pouring billions into conferences, and legalized gambling sites funneling millions onto campuses, and apparently a football school just can’t afford to lose three of its first five games anymore. Wisconsin is 2-3, and Chryst is gone. He is fired with a 67-26 record in 93 games, nearly identical to Bret Bielema’s 68-24 mark there in 92 games, and better, actually, than Barry Alvarez’s mark over his final 93 games: 61-32.
Bielema is at Illinois now, and thumped Chryst’s Badgers 34-10 on Saturday. Chryst was fired 24 hours later.
Who’s next? The buzzards are circling above Bryan Harsin at Auburn and Mel Tucker at Michigan State. Harsin signed a six-year, $31.5 million deal before last season, with a buyout of more than $15 million. Pocket change, in other words, compared to what Michigan State would owe Tucker, who signed a fully guaranteed deal for 10 years and $95 million less than a year ago. Michigan State is 2-3 and getting worse, and Michigan is ranked No. 4 in the country, and you just don’t know what will happen next.
College football is a copycat world, with presidents and athletic directors and boosters at certain schools unable to control themselves, and it all comes back to the SEC. Most schools have their version of a state-of-the-art college football center, but the states and the arts are different down South. The 247.com website ranked the Top 25 facilities in college football this year, and the SEC has three of the top five — and 12 of the top 20.
What’s the point of such facilities? Well, recruits like ‘em. Can’t win without talent, though some schools hedge their bets by throwing money at coaches as well. Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, Georgia’s Kirby Smart, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher and Alabama’s Nick Saban have contracts in the $100 million range, give or take. So does, gulp, Mel Tucker.
Everyone else does their best to keep up, which is why Purdue found $36.8 million for Jeff Brohm through 2027 and IU found $27.3 million for Tom Allen through 2027. Purdue’s awesome football facility still smells of fresh paint, and Drew Brees heads The Boilermaker Alliance to funnel $6 million a year to the school’s athletes. At IU they have the upgraded locker room and the Hoosiers For Good collective, linking athletes to charities.
Also at IU they have a football program going in the wrong direction, with fans losing patience while other schools around the country, around the Big Ten, have made a change. It’s an ugly business, getting uglier. Paul Chryst is gone. Someone else is next. These cats, they sure do like to copy.
In unrelated news, nobody in the NFL has been fired this season. Five firings in college football, zero in the NFL. Does that seem weird? It is, but here’s a sentence that will explain it, a sentence that doesn’t feel good to write:
College football is a bigger business than the NFL.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Wisconsin fires Paul Chryst as college football races to bottom
