The Jimbo Two-Step

In modern college football, sustained winning is for suckers. Is Kirby Smart on to something?

For the record, I would like to win the lottery.

Cashing the winning Powerball ticket just seems like a fun thing to do. One day you have your little stash of life savings, the next you have that stash plus a billion dollars. I feel like I could make that work.

But evidently handling sudden fortune isn’t as easy as it sounds. Lottery winners have no experience handling Rich People Problems and routinely make dopey decisions about investments, yachts, handouts and mansions. This can leave them miserable, even bankrupt.

Depositing that big check is easy; knowing what to do next is the hard part.

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College football has won the lottery. It took a couple of decades, but it happened.

When our ancestors watched the sport on their Zenith console TVs while sipping Falstaffs, there was a skinny weekly slate of Saturday afternoon matchups on a couple of channels, as decreed by the TV Guide sitting on the coffee table. The pixels on the TV screen did not involve plasma or LED; whatever level of definition was presented didn’t matter as long as it was in color.

Today you can watch college football games most days of the week and morning to night on Saturdays. You can access each of them (other than the mysterious and possibly fake Peacock ones) on any screen in your life including the one you’re staring at right now. The number of weekly eyeballs fixed on college football is at an all time high.

Because attention is money, college football has exploded into a $6 billion industry. In the 1990s, ESPN paid the entire College Football Association a quaint $28 million a year to televise football games; today, the Big Ten conference alone has a TV rights package worth $1 billion annually.

As a result, universities are doing what all new lottery winners do: stumbling around with million dollar bills spilling from their pockets with no idea where to put them.

Luckily, the coaches are here to help.

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Leading a college football team is a good gig if you can get it. You get your own radio show and your face is on TV a lot. You have unlimited access to visors and windbreakers. Strangers at the post office and grocery store smile and call you “Coach.”

Also, there’s lots of money. As we’ve discussed before, in 2023 there are 36 coaches making at least $5 million a year and 10 making at least $9 million.

But it’s not all fun and games. As a coach you’re constantly judged on your latest result, you’re forced to work brutal hours to keep up with your rivals and you must spend your spare time texting and calling 17 year old boys like your job depends on it (it does).

That’s no way to live over the long term. But there is a better way.

In the drunken post-lottery world of college football, the typical coach’s contract includes an obscene “buyout” payment in the event he is fired. In 2023, 28 coaches have buyouts of at least $20 million and 12 have buyouts in excess of $40 million.

And so the optimal financial strategy for a modern college football coach is to (1) succeed just enough to secure an employment contract with a big fat buyout, then (2) get fired.

Let’s call it the Jimbo Two-Step.

Saint Jimbo

The patron saint of contract buyouts is Jimbo Fisher.

Fisher became a hot commodity while winning a bunch of games at Florida State, including a national championship in 2014. Texas A&M then lured him to the SEC where he did well enough to land a contract extension — which included one of those big fat buyouts — in 2021.

Fisher then did the smart thing: he gradually began to lose. Not suddenly or dramatically — that can arouse suspicion and trigger investigations. No, Fisher did it the right way, leading Texas A&M to a disappointing 8-4 in 2021 and an unacceptable 5-7 in 2022 before stumbling out of the gate again in 2023.

Last month Texas A&M had seen enough. They fired Fisher, triggering his glorious $76 million buyout.

Jimbo Fisher was making $9 million a year to work like a maniac as coach of Texas A&M. He will now get an average of $9 million per year through 2031 for doing nothing.

That’s how it’s done. The Jimbo Two-Step.

Next Up: Kirby Smart?

Kirby Smart is an excellent college football coach by any metric. His Georgia Bulldogs have won two straight national championships and were well positioned to contend for a threepeat next month until they were tripped up by Alabama in the SEC Championship game on Saturday.

But Smart has to work hard for his $10 million salary. When a coach produces excellence his greedy fan base devours it and asks for seconds and thirds, and so Smart now finds himself in a position where anything less than a national title is a disappointment. To Bulldog Nation, the Orange Bowl matchup against Florida State is a sad consolation prize.

But maybe Kirby is smarter than we think. Perhaps this is the beginning of his Jimbo Two-Step.

It’s hard to fathom in this era of Georgia dominance, but if Kirby Smart slides into a period of mediocrity he could find himself out on the street alongside Jimbo Fisher. If that happened today, Kirby Smart would receive a $92 million buyout. That is not a typo.

NINETY TWO MILLION DOLLARS would be payable to Kirby Smart if he got fired in 2023.

Kirby Smart makes $10 million a year to work harder than anyone you know. His unemployed alter ego, Kirby Mediocre, would make $10 million per year for nine years to do nothing, anything, whatever he wants as long as it’s not coaching Georgia football.

In today’s college football coaching economy, sustained winning is for suckers. Winning for a while and then losing is where the big (and easy) money is.

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Perhaps one day college football will get its financial house in order and figure out the best way to spend its lottery winnings. Today is not that day.

Until then, be aware of your coach’s contract and keep an eye out for suspicious losing. The Jimbo Two-Step may be coming to a city near you.