Let’s be honest, Mike Norvell should have been fired by now.

His resume isn’t as impressive as Brian Kelly’s, and his winning percentage is worse than Mike Gundy’s. He is not one year removed from college football’s semifinals like James Franklin and he’s had more time to build a program than Billy Napier.

Yet, LSU, Oklahoma State, Penn State and Florida all whacked those coaches in the last month and Norvell is still standing at Florida State.

Why is that?

Because the Seminoles can’t afford the $59 million it could take to fire him.

I don’t know if that makes FSU more fiscally responsible than other universities or it just means they are the NCAA’s poorer relations. Either way, it’s another example in the growing list of insane financial rabbit holes in college football.

Florida, Penn State, Oklahoma State and LSU are on the hook for around $138 million in salaries to coaches who are no longer in their employ. Now, we’re way past the point of saying college football is big business, but paying tens of millions of dollars for failed tenures seems a little antithetical to the idea of higher learning.

And, yes, most of those buyouts are funded by boosters and don’t really come out of a university’s general budget. But does that make those cash grabs any less obscene?

Here’s another way of looking at it:

Louisiana has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, yet Kelly will walk away from Baton Rouge with $53 million worth of paychecks for work he will never complete. How many scholarships could be funded by that lump sum, and how many lives could be forever changed with that in mind?

Which brings us back to Norvell, who seems to be a decent, hard-working man who simply hasn’t won enough football games. And yet, his severance pay would require security guards and an armored car. Which may explain why athletic director Michael Alford recently insinuated that Norvell’s future would not be decided until after the season.

I don’t blame Norvell for leveraging his brief success in Tallahassee into a fat, new contract. That’s the way the game is played. You either boost your salary by jumping from one job to the next or by threatening to jump and coercing your current school to renegotiate.

The fault lies with university administrators who are worried about boosters breathing down their necks, and so they recklessly guarantee contracts in a sport where there are no guarantees on the field.

And that’s exactly what FSU has discovered with Norvell.

School officials were patient while he rebuilt the roster through two losing seasons in 2020-21 — more patient than they were with his predecessor Willie Taggart — and reaped the rewards of a 23-4 record in 2022-23. But the Seminoles imploded last year and haven’t been much better this season.

There are a lot of ways to measure a football program’s performance, and conference results are the most basic.

Norvell’s record in the Atlantic Coast Conference going into this weekend’s game against Wake Forest was 20-24. To put that in perspective, Bobby Bowden went 117-27 in the ACC while at Florida State. Of course, that was another era, and nobody in Tallahassee expects an .813 winning percentage in league games anymore.

But they also don’t expect to have the ACC’s ninth-best record since 2020.

Even worse, there is no smoking gun to point at. Could Norvell be a better recruiter? Sure, but a composite report of 3-, 4- and 5-star recruits at 24/ 7sports.com suggests the Seminoles have the 19th most talented roster in the nation. Indiana, Vanderbilt, BYU, Virginia, Cincinnati and Houston are all in the AP top 25 poll and are not among the 50 most talented rosters in the nation, according to that chart. That’s a pretty damning indication that FSU is underperforming.

As an aside, LSU (sixth), Penn State (10th) and Florida (12th) were all in the top 15 of that 24/7 list, which might explain why they all have interim coaches today.

The truth is, college football is still in the early days of a revolution, and no one has a firm grasp on the ins and outs of dynasty-building in this new era. Is the secret having the biggest name, image and likeness budget? Is it being aggressive in the transfer portal? Is it continuity on the roster? Is it a coach who is a recruiter, or a coach known for innovative game plans? Is it tradition or facilities or demonstrating a pathway to the NFL?

In an ideal world, a program would get high marks in all of those areas. But, at the very least, it would seem to suggest that the sport’s dynamics have changed, which means guaranteeing exorbitant salaries to coaches might not be the smartest business decision.

At least, not as far as the university is concerned.

It does, however, seem to be working out dandy for Norvell and his peers.

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