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The enormous salaries and buyouts among top college football coaches has gotten the attention of Congress.
U.S. Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-Wash.) recently introduced a bill — the Correcting Opportunity and Accountability in Collegiate Hiring (COACH) Act — aimed at capping what coaches can be paid.
The bill would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to ensure that “the total annual compensation paid, promised, or provided to any athletics department employee does not exceed 10 times the institution’s tuition and required fees for a first-time, full-time undergraduate for the most recent academic year.”
LSU fired football coach Brian Kelly on Sunday. While buyout terms were being negotiated, he was set to be owed roughly $54 million. James Franklin is owed $49 million from Penn State after his firing earlier this month, and fired Florida coach Billy Napier is owed $21 million.
“Schools that publish contract data for their head coaches have amassed $1.7 billion in potential buyout liabilities,” Baumgartner said in a release. “This season alone, colleges are on pace to pay over $169 million for coaches not to coach. This amount equals a full year of operating revenue at a top-tier Division I program—enough to rank as a top-13 athletics department by revenue. My bill puts an end to that. College sports are highly subsidized public goods, not a professional enterprise.
“Even in professional sports, cost controls exist: salary caps operate within narrow antitrust frameworks recognized by Congress and the courts,” he added. “The COACH Act is a simple guardrail to bring sanity back to the financial management of college sports—it creates a narrow, lawful path for schools to set reasonable limits on coaches’ pay. It’s time for Congress to step in to restore sanity to college sports.”
Georgia’s Kirby Smart is reportedly the highest-paid college football coach in the country at about $13 million per year. Ohio State’s Ryan Day is second at $12.5 million per, and Indiana’s Curt Cignetti recently became the third-highest paid football coach with an eight-year contract extension that will pay him $11.6 million per year.
