What's shocking about Texas A&M paying Jimbo Fisher $77M to go away? How normal it seems

The most alarming part of Texas A&M’s decision to spend roughly $77 million to make Jimbo Fisher go away is how normal it seems. 

Sticker shock? That no longer exists in college athletics, where there's always a well of money somewhere − and, in this case, might literally be true given how much of the school’s purchasing power comes from Texas oil. 

Accountability? A well-functioning business would see the meager return Texas A&M has gotten on its $120-plus million total investment in Fisher and ensure those in charge of making the initial decision to hire him back in 2017 and doubling down on it with a new 10-year contract in 2021 would never come close to that kind of responsibility again. 

Shame and embarrassment? Texas A&M boosters and school officials are more likely to be clinking champagne glasses and lighting cigars.

Just a handful of years ago, it was a big deal − a stain on your program, even − if the cost of firing a coach hit $10 million. But once that threshold was crossed, the economics of the sport started veering into something resembling fraud. Maybe not in the legal sense, but certainly in the ethos and spirit of it. 

And it all goes back to one thing: The people who run college football have decided to sanction a completely open, unfettered market for coaching talent where the contracts are only written to be enforceable in one direction.

In the NFL or any other professional sports league, coaches cannot just jump from one franchise to another. They have real contracts that bind them to their jobs, and there are limited mechanisms to get out that often require some type of compensation going from one team to another. That is why you do not see six teams putting in bids for whichever coach wins the Super Bowl every year: NFL owners have figured out that would be bad for their business, so they simply don’t allow it to happen. 

In college, however, the only part of a contract that really matters is how much it will cost for the school to get out of it. There is always a provision for what a coach must pay to break the contract if they get a different job, but it is typically nominal compared to the money they’re guaranteed if they simply lose too many games. Put another way, agents have rigged the system with the complicity of athletics directors so that coaches can change jobs whenever they want but get paid every dime if the school decides it's not working out. 

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It has led to a system where somebody like Jimbo Fisher could sign a 10-year, $75 million deal to leave Florida State for Texas A&M, have one good year and then get an even sweeter 10-year, $95 million contract based on the notion that one small run of success would put the Aggies at risk of losing him if they didn’t say yes to everything he and his agent wanted.

Moreover, since nearly all of the high-level head coaches are controlled by a small handful of agents, it’s an easy game to play: All it takes is one job like Texas A&M opening for one powerful agent to get a raft of clients paid. 

That isn't a business, it’s a hostage negotiation. And every single time, the schools come out on the losing end to the point where $77 million just doesn’t seem like a huge deal anymore. In fact, given the overall mediocre results over the last six seasons − Fisher is 26-21 in the SEC with no division titles − A&M is not wrong in concluding that it had to be done. 

Maybe the oil barons who like rooting for a historically middling football program don’t care whatsoever about $77 million plus whatever it's going to take to pay off all the assistant coaches under contract and bring in a new, expensive staff. For some of them, it’s probably couch cushion money. If that’s how they want to spend it, go right ahead. 

But the people who sign off on these decisions like athletics directors and presidents, do, in fact, work for universities which are in constant need of lots of money to do the kinds of important things that serve their students, employees and communities.

Why has it become so easy for them to approve of these massive contracts they know are doomed to failure? Are there going to be no consequences for anyone at Texas A&M who was involved in such a dramatic misreading of Fisher’s capabilities? 

Fisher may be the first coach to get $77 million not to work anymore, but he’s not going to be the last. The $9 million-per-year coach is now an industry standard, and the arrow is only pointing in one direction. 

The curious part is why college administrators seem OK with this while begging Congress to pass a law that ensures they never have to make their athletes employees and pay them salaries. 

Even if you just take the $15.2 million that Texas A&M will have to pay Fisher within 60 days of his firing and divvy it up among the current team, that would equate to $179,000 for each of the 85 Aggie players allowed to be on scholarship − and they’d still owe Fisher $7.6 million each year for the next eight. 

Compare that to when Fisher won the national title at Florida State exactly a decade ago. He was making $2.75 million in base salary and got bumped to over $4 million shortly thereafter to put him in line with other elite coaches. In a relatively short amount of time, super agent Jimmy Sexton and a few others who represent the top-level coaches have managed to create an entirely new economy out of thin air. All he needed was the threat of coaches changing jobs, and occasionally one like Fisher who was actually willing to jump from one major program to another.

There are a lot of problems college sports can’t really fix, but this is one completely within its control. And the answer is pretty simple: When universities formally recognize the value of the players by paying them, the value of the coaches and the leverage they hold will naturally decrease.

A huge part of the reason Texas A&M guaranteed Fisher $95 million was because recruiting is one part of the job he did very well. For the school, it’s a fixed cost. Rather than be in a competitive marketplace for talent like an NFL team with a salary cap, they can just funnel it all to the coach. 

But every time someone like Fisher gets a small nation’s GDP to flame out of a job, that system makes less and less sense. At some point, you’d think schools would start to figure it out or at least show a little more restraint. When we find out in a few weeks who Texas A&M has hired to replace Fisher, however, that will almost certainly not be the case.