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The Sunshine State could be turning into the buyout state.
It’s been a tough start to the college football season in Florida north of Miami. While the Hurricanes are a top-10 team with eyes on making this year’s expanded 12-team playoff, Florida and Florida State have both struggled to start the season, with Florida at 1-2 and Florida State 0-3, leading fans to call for both coaches’ jobs.
Billy Napier (above, right), the Gators’ third-year coach, appears to be on the wrong side of a fundraiser as school boosters have reportedly gathered the money to fund Napier’s buyout. In 2021, Napier signed a seven-year contract worth roughly $52 million to become Florida’s coach. At the time, he was one of the hottest names in college coaching after going 40–12 in four seasons at Louisiana-Lafayette.
But he’s gone just 12–16 in Gainesville and has the program on track for its fifth consecutive losing season. The Gators started the season unranked, but they needed to show progress after going just 5–7 a year ago. Should he be fired, the school would owe Napier $26 million, which high-ranking boosters have reportedly pledged to fund.
Farther north, Mike Norvell has Florida State not faring much better. On Saturday, the Seminoles became the first preseason top-10 team to start the season 0–3 with all three losses coming by unranked opponents. The Noles, which started the season ranked No. 10 in the AP poll, have no realistic path to the expanded playoff. But they are coming off a season in which the team went 13–1 and was out of the four-team playoff despite being undefeated because of a season-ending injury to star quarterback Jordan Travis.
Parting ways with Norvell a year after an incredible season would be questionable and cost-prohibitive. Norvell originally signed a six-year contract worth $26.5 million in 2019 to become FSU’s coach after leaving Memphis. He’s been given two recent extensions, one in 2023 that paid roughly $8 million a year and another this past January for 10 years worth more than $84 million, after flirting with Alabama as a possible replacement for Nick Saban. The deal made him the sixth-highest-paid coach in the country.
Firing Norvell now would put the Noles on the hook for $65 million, which equates to 85% of his base salary and supplemental pay for the remainder of his current contract, which ends Dec. 31, 2031.
Even if Florida or FSU finds the funds to pay their coaches to leave, the buyout money wouldn’t set any records. Texas A&M set the bar for that a year ago when it paid $77.6 million to buy out Jimbo Fisher just three years into a 10-year extension.
