After a search process that spanned nearly three months and numerous rumored rejections, Penn State hired Matt Campbell to be its football coach last December. The Big Ten school gave Campbell a rare fully guaranteed contract, worth at least $70.5 million over eight years.
The deal is off to a rough start.
With a 21-18 loss to Michigan on Saturday, the Nittany Lions have now lost four straight games and remain winless in conference play. Empty seats have plagued Beaver Stadium, and fans have booed Campbell for weeks.
“There’s a lot of season left,” Campbell told reporters after losing to Michigan, a statement that may actually be true for him despite many fans calling for his job. If Penn State ousts Campbell this week, it would cost the school more than $62 million.
Campbell is the posterchild for a new chapter in college football’s broken economics. Penn State gave a coach who was nowhere near its first choice one of the more lucrative and ironclad contracts in the sport. Less than one year later, the golden handcuffs have boomeranged back. Campbell may be too expensive to fire.
Penn State is far from alone here. Over the past few years, big time college athletic departments have been unable to rein in the market for coaches, continuing to drive salaries—and maybe more critically, buyouts—to all-time highs. That was fine in the past, when frustrated boosters would often pony up the cash needed to make a mid-contract move.
Now, however, schools are pushing every last dollar into the pockets of athletes. It’s exposed a strange paradox. Schools have negotiated themselves into a box: unwilling to pay coaches less, and as a result, unable to fire them. Whoops!
We are now through seven weeks of the college football season, and not a single FBS head football coach has been fired. Before the start of the season, that would have seemed unthinkable. Plenty of big programs are struggling, and college football’s win-now imperative has never been more apparent. Last season UCLA, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Virginia Tech all fired their coaches in September. Florida, Penn State and LSU followed shortly after.
“It’s a money thing,” an agent recently told Yahoo Sports about the stalled coaching carousel. “People who don’t have any money to pay players are having to rethink what their ceiling is with their current spend.”
The rush of vacancies last year likely created a slower market this year, but an all-hands-on-deck effort to maximize the money that goes into college football rosters is also driving the new reality. The House vs. NCAA settlement was meant to cap revenue sharing to roughly $21 million per campus; the biggest schools have found ways to blow right past that. Between revenue sharing and NIL, football rosters at schools like Ohio State, Oregon and Texas currently cost around $50 million, according to reporting by The Athletic.
Believe it or not, there was once an open question about whether the money to pay college athletes would come out of the pocket of their million-dollar coaches. In October 2020, for example, a Brookings research paper stated that “we would expect slower growth in coaches’ salaries” once athletes begin sharing in revenue.
Instead, we’ve seen the opposite. College football coaches now make up 20 of the 50 highest-paid coaches in U.S. sports, eclipsing their NFL peers. The list includes Colorado’s Deion Sanders ($10.8 million per year), Florida State’s Mike Norvell ($9.96 million) and Campbell ($8.81 million), all of whom are facing pressure from frustrated fans.
The current buyouts for those three coaches alone, according to Sportico’s calculations, total more than $135 million. And while schools have historically looked unflinchingly at those totals—public FBS programs paid about $700 million in football buyouts from 2017-2025, per Sportico’s college finance database—none have opened their wallets so far this season.
Maybe there’s some benefit here. According to Yahoo Sports, both Baylor and Wisconsin considered firing their football coaches last year, ultimately deciding instead to put that money into their rosters. Both those teams are currently 4-2, having at least temporarily righted the ship without needing the buyout. That said, others will almost certainly miss out on an opportunity to reset their football program with a new leader.
Norvell and Florida State are another example of how this economy has gotten away from schools. The two sides reworked Norvell’s deal in December 2024 after the Seminoles finished 2-10 in the program’s worst season in 50 years. The revised agreement kept a notably large buyout in place.
Norvell occupies one of the hottest seats in college football, but it would cost Florida State about $50 million to fire him. That’s about a quarter of the school’s annual athletics budget, according to data in Sportico’s college finance database, and roughly two years’ worth of football ticket sales.
It doesn’t help that Florida State reported $437 million in athletics debt in 2024-25, the second highest total of any public school in the country. The only one larger? Penn State, Matt Campbell’s employer, at $535 million.