Sunday was not a good day for James Franklin in every aspect with the lone exception of his bank account.
For every other college football head coach on the hot seat though, it may have been an even worse series of events in the wake of Penn State parting ways with somebody who had won 104 games at the school for a price tag that is the second-biggest buyout in the sport’s history.
As difficult as the weekend was for the former Nittany Lions head coach, at least he has some closure on his tenure in Happy Valley and can spend the next few months to plot out his next move.
Everybody else who’s feeling the heat from their fan base? Well now it’s really time to start sweating.
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School admins and boosters just got plenty of cover to make their own moves after Penn State dropped a $50 million bag to get rid of Franklin just nine months removed from making a College Football Playoff semifinal. If he can go, what’s to stop others from pulling the same trigger for far less money?
Welcome to the latest edition of The Hunger Games in college coaching.
“Football is our backbone. We’ve invested at the highest level and with that comes high expectations. Ultimately I believe a new leader can help us win a national championship and now is the right time for this change,” Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft said Monday in detailing the decision. “This is about the modern era of college football. Our next coach needs to maximize elite level resources.”
If you’re a Kentucky fan who recently read about $36 million being invested into Kroger Field before the season started and saw a significant uptick on the amount spent on the Wildcats’ roster in 2025, perhaps it suddenly doesn’t sound so bad that head coach Mark Stoops carries a $37.6 million buyout within 60 days right now after hearing that line.
Stoops may be the most successful coach in the modern era for the program, but he’s also gone from 10–3 in 2021 to 20–23 overall across the last four seasons. Kentucky has won one SEC game in two years and carries an eight-game conference losing streak into Saturday’s game against No. 21 Texas.
It may be hoops season already around the commonwealth but a big decision on football could loom large over the next few weeks.
The same is true further north in Madison, Wis. It was generally considered unthinkable coming into the season that Wisconsin would even entertain cutting ties with Luke Fickell given his $27.5 million price tag. The Badgers’ athletic department prides itself on being fiscally responsible and growing as much as it can within its means.
But if you looked out at the swaths of open seats at Camp Randall following the team’s latest loss, it may be more expensive to keep the floundering coach around instead of swallowing some pride and cutting the check.
“Well, that’s as low as it can be. I apologize. I apologized to our guys. To not be ready, to not have them ready, I’m dumbfounded in a lot of ways. But that’s my job,” Fickell said last week after being shut out 37–0 by Iowa. “If we don’t compete, none of us are going to be here. That’s the truth.”
He’s closer to those words becoming reality than at any point this year thanks to Sunday’s decision by a fellow Big Ten school. It doesn’t help matters for Fickell or the Badgers either that they don’t have a Power 4 victory this season and still have to play Ohio State, Oregon, Washington, Indiana, Illinois and Minnesota; 2–10 seems like a very real possibility for a head coach who is 8–13 in league play entering Week 7.
Fickell is far from alone in the company of misery at least.
Florida’s Billy Napier seems to have spent more time under heat than free and clear of it as it only seems like a question of when the Gators part ways with $20.4 million and not if they start looking for a fifth head coach since Urban Meyer left town.
Auburn’s Hugh Freeze, now 14–17 on the Plains across three seasons, is in a situation that is just as perilous.
The Tigers are currently 92nd in the country in scoring—Freeze’s supposed specialty being offense, it should be noted—and have won on the road just three times in the SEC the last three years. His buyout is shockingly modest at $15.4 million come Dec. 1. Of all the schools you would pick to think rationally about a coach after just 31 games in charge, Auburn may be the last program in the country to do so given its tumultuous history.
Perhaps the most unique situation lies in Chapel Hill, N.C. There were a number of reports that surfaced in the past 10 days surrounding the state of North Carolina’s football program and that there was even some early exploration being done on an eventual separation from the offseason’s biggest hire, Bill Belichick.
“Reports about my looking for a buyout or trying to leave here is categorically false,” Belichick said at his Monday news conference that was attended by the university chancellor, athletic director and general manager. “There’s zero truth to any of that. I’m glad I’m here. We’re working toward our goals. We believe very much in the process. We need to just keep working and grinding away.”
As much as it would be a humiliating thing to admit to after all the summer hoopla around the hire, the Tar Heels’ gamble to land one of the greatest NFL coaches of all time has been a powder blue catastrophe. North Carolina looks like one of the two or three worst power-conference programs in 2025 and don’t seem primed to usher in a quick turnaround with Michael Lombardi sending letters to boosters about pivoting to rely on young high school players moving forward recently.
A $20 million buyout for Belichick would be an expensive mistake but a correctable one, especially if the Tar Heels could pivot to landing a head coach who actually knows college football and has far less hubris about how to win games at this level than the current group in charge.
Plus, now they have cover to stop throwing the good money after the bad with head coaches who clearly aren’t working out.
Penn State made that calculation Sunday. The Nittany Lions generated $44.5 million in football ticket sales for the most recent season where data is available (2023) and understood that figure was going to plummet moving forward if they kept Franklin around for a toxic situation that was only bound to get worse after losing quarterback Drew Allar for the year.
At least now they can get fans to rally around the current team instead of turning against them, giving the only thing anybody needs in college sports in the process: hope.
“This is not a three-game thing. This is really diving into where we were as a program, what is the trajectory of this program,” Kraft said. “I’m not shy to admit it, I’m here to win a national championship. I believe our fans deserve that. I wake up every day trying to achieve that goal.”
Texas A&M’s remarkable decision to tell Jimbo Fisher to go away for $77 million in 2023 was done from the same perspective. In retrospect, it was a canary in the coal mine whistling to the wider world of college athletics that the number is the number when you have to make a critical decision for the health and benefit of a program overall.
It has worked out better than most imagined despite carrying a recurring budget hit for many more years, with the Aggies currently undefeated and ranked in the top four of the polls under successor Mike Elko.
Penn State moving on from Franklin was no one-off in State College, Pa., just like the events that preceded it in College Station, Texas, for the last head-turning buyout.
Sunday was a signal that the floodgates are about to open. Now everybody has an excuse to do the same.
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