Kelly Suing LSU for Full $53M Buyout After Refusing Settlement Offers

Former LSU head coach Brian Kelly has filed a lawsuit against LSU to force the university to pay the full $53 million worth of his buyout after being fired Oct. 26, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by Front Office Sports.

ESPN first reported the news of the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed in the 19th judicial district court for the Parish of East Baton Rouge, says that LSU informed Kelly that it has taken the position that he has not been “formally terminated,” and that it was going to argue that he was fired “for cause”—meaning it wouldn’t owe him his $53 million buyout.

Kelly’s lawyers are seeking “a declaratory judgment confirming that LSU’s termination of Coach Kelly is without cause and that Coach Kelly is entitled to receive the full liquidated damages provided for” in his contract.

A representative for the LSU athletic department told FOS the school did not have a comment at this time.

Kelly was fired after a lopsided loss to Texas A&M in late October. He is owed a $53 million buyout, payable in equal monthly installments of about $800,000, per his contract. Though he does have a duty to mitigate and an offset clause—meaning that he’s required to look for another job—and that LSU will owe him only the difference between the buyout and his new salary.

However, the buyout is theoretically owed only if Kelly was fired “without cause.” The buyout is not owed if he was fired “for cause,” which does not include whether he coached a winning team. His contract details the definition of for cause, which includes things like being convicted of a crime, committing “serious misconduct,” or “failing promptly to report any such material or substantial violation by another person to the Director of Compliance.”

If LSU wanted to fire Kelly “for cause,” it would have gone through a process outlined in his contract beginning with a written notice to him seven days in advance, according to the complaint, which it allegedly did not do.

Upon firing Kelly, LSU said in a statement that it was working on a separation agreement—implying that Kelly might agree to take a smaller portion of his $53 million buyout in a lump sum rather than wait for the full $53 million through monthly installments. The day Kelly was fired, the school offered Kelly lump-sum payments of $25 million and $30 million, the lawsuit said (and was previously reported by The New Orleans Advocate). Kelly rejected them, but said “he remained open to any additional offers that LSU would like to make to amend its liquidated damages payment obligations by accelerating payments and/or eliminating the mitigation and offset provisions of the Agreement.”

LSU held a call with Kelly on Nov. 10 and told him that he “had not been formally terminated” and that it “believed grounds for termination for cause existed,” court documents said. Kelly’s representatives disputed the claims in the meeting that he was terminated for cause (and, in the court filing, cited multiple instances where it had been made clear to Kelly privately and publicly that he had, in fact, been fired). 

The lawsuit also included communications from Kelly’s legal representatives to LSU representatives alleging that Kelly was told someone from the governor’s office would be reaching out to Kelly to discuss the terms of his buyout. The revelation is significant in that it suggests yet another layer to the involvement of Gov. Jeff Landry, who inserted himself into Kelly’s firing and opined on the coaching search—comments that ended with the exit of athletic director Scott Woodward. (Current AD Verge Ausberry disputed this claim in an email attached to the court filing.)