With LSU’s $53 million firing of Brian Kelly meaning three of the SEC’s sixteen teams have fired their football coaches since the beginning of the season (along with Florida and Arkansas), fellow coaches across the conference are lamenting college football’s new reality.
“Very surprising, I mean, it’s the college world we’re living in now,” No. 7 Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin said during his weekly Monday press conference. “If you think about it, we talk about how the players are now like NFL players—how they’re paid. Now, I feel like the college coaches are more like the NFL coaches where the firings happen quicker.”
No. 5 Georgia coach Kirby Smart echoed Kiffin’s thoughts. “I think there’s so much built around the playoffs. It’s like everything is boom or bust, and you can’t have a normal season,” Smart said Monday. “People have to make decisions earlier based on how somebody does.”
Smart, who was an assistant coach at LSU in 2004, admitted the expectations in Baton Rouge are extremely high. “A guy once told me, ‘That office you’re in, that’s not your office. You’re borrowing it.’ And I knew right then, if you didn’t win, you wouldn’t be there long,” he said.
Kiffin brought up Texas A&M’s $77 million buyout for firing Jimbo Fisher in 2023, saying the No. 3 Aggies likely feel “pretty good” as the SEC’s lone undefeated team under second-year coach Mike Elko. “Anytime something works, other people go, ‘Well, let’s go do that,’” Kiffin said. “I think that’s happened. Now places are accepting to pay these buyouts—which I think is ridiculous—but that it’s happening, then it’s easier for the next team and the next team to do it.”
Bayou Buyout
Urban Meyer, who is now a Fox Sports analyst after winning national championships at Florida and Ohio State, questioned the behind-the-scenes of Kelly’s firing, which reportedly included conversations with Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry and key university boosters.
“If the governor and other non-football people are making this decision,” Meyer said on The Triple Option podcast he cohosts, “as a coach, that’s an alarm going off, saying, ‘Wait a minute. Really?’”
Meyer added, “If you’re now going to interview for the head coaching position at LSU, do you meet with the governor?”
Record Payday?
LSU and Florida are widely believed to be interested in hiring Kiffin away from Ole Miss, potentially willing to make Kiffin the highest-paid coach in college football. Smart currently tops the list, according to USA Today, with a $13.28 million salary, while Kiffin is tied for 10th at $9 million annually.
However, Kiffin said money won’t be a factor in his future. “I have never made a decision based on money, nor will I,” Kiffin said Monday on The Pat McAfee Show.
Kiffin added he had “seen too many examples in life that money does not buy happiness.” However, he jokingly admitted his agent, college football coaching magnate Jimmy Sexton, “gets really mad when I say that.”
