‘The Schools Clearly Aren’t in Control’: Inside College Football’s Wild Week - CalBearsMaven

He made one last call to close friend and A&M coach Jimbo Fisher to gauge his interest before entering more serious discussions with Trace Armstrong, the agent for Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly.

Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images (Kelly); Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports (Riley).

“We had already basically made the deal in terms of … [Kelly] was going to come here,” says one prominent LSU official with knowledge of the final days of the search.

“I’m not going to be the next head coach at LSU,” he told reporters after the Bedlam loss.

And within a day after that, Woodward’s hire was made known: He lured Kelly from Notre Dame.

The two moves shook college football in an unprecedented 36 hours.

What’s more, one of those coaches, Kelly, left a team that has a chance to advance to the College Football Playoff.

Both coaches made misdirection plays on their way out the door—Riley telling only half of the truth about where he would or would not be coaching, and Kelly finalizing the deal with LSU while on the road recruiting for Notre Dame.

Sports Illustrated talked to more than a dozen people within college athletics in various capacities about what the coaches’ moves say about the broader context of college sports.

senator told SI the decisions will spark more congressional interference in the college world, while administrators say they are concerned about further impacts on Olympic sports, which have routinely borne the brunt of the spare-no-expense spending on football.

economy struggles to rebound financially in a post-COVID-19 world, college football coaching salaries are spiking to exorbitant levels, contracts are extending to record lengths and buyouts are at a historic high.

In 2004, the school made Saban the first college coach to make at least $2 million.

LSU’s contract with Kelly makes him, for now, the highest-paid public-school coach in the country.

As AD at Texas A&M, Woodward had previously signed Jimbo Fisher to what was then the most exorbitant contract in college football history—a guaranteed, 10-year, $75 million deal.

Early in the search process, he and a small committee of administrators identified six or so candidates, a who’s who in the sport: Fisher, Franklin, Kelly, Tucker, Riley and NFL coach Matt Rhule.

Brian Kelly said his decision to leave Notre Dame for LSU gave him "another opportunity, another challenge.".

Administrators at Notre Dame knew of Kelly’s interest to leave well before last week, and there were signs over the final month of the regular season the coach was bound to exit.

“There is a sense you get when you work with somebody for 12 years that there is a restlessness,” Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick told reporters during a news conference Tuesday.

After Notre Dame’s home finale, against Georgia Tech, Kelly addressed his seniors by saying, “For some of us this is our last game here”—a comment that one source says caught the attention of several people in the room.

Kelly’s agent, Armstrong, contacted the Notre Dame administration about contract enhancements multiple times over the final weeks of the season, but no final offer was brought to the Irish to match.

Kelly notified Notre Dame officials of his departure about 30 minutes after initial reports surfaced online, and the coach was recruiting a prospect in California when the news trickled out.

No sitting Notre Dame coach has left for a different job on his own volition since 1907, and the last time an Oklahoma coach left for another position was ’47.

Notre Dame is also within range of a College Football Playoff berth.

As with virtually every rule change in college sports, the early signing period has produced unintended consequences, something SEC commissioner Greg Sankey cautioned years ago.

“I can go back on my computer and find the letter when early signing was being considered that said, ‘You are going to change the cycle of coaching turnover,’’’ Sankey told reporters Wednesday after the latest College Football Playoff committee meetings in Dallas.

American Football Coaches Association executive director Todd Berry says coaches “warned” against the early signing period change.

Michigan State officials tried to get ahead of the coaching carousel by offering head coach Mel Tucker a $95M, 10-year contract extension last month.

Berry, himself a former coach at Army and Louisiana-Monroe, says coaches don’t enjoy the hiring and firing cycles and dread “Black Sunday” or “Bloody Sunday,” the nicknames within the industry for the day after the regular season ends.

In the 2021 cycle, coaching opportunities at USC, Florida, Notre Dame, LSU and Oklahoma have opened.

Notre Dame hasn’t had an opening since 2009, while Oklahoma hasn’t had a true job search since 1998.

I’m not saying it’s going to be the end of college athletics—I’m not going to be that drastic—but it does change things.”.

Twenty years ago, while AD at Maryland, Yow doled out one of the first 10-year contracts to football coach Ralph Friedgen, spreading out $12 million over a decade.

But that facet of salary escalation has come under the heaviest fire from college athletics watchdog groups and Congress.

“That’s probably the most indefensible part of it,” says Tom McMillen, a former college athlete and ex-Congressman who now is the CEO of Lead1, a college athletics lobbying firm.

A recent analysis by ESPN found that $402.3 million in dead money was spent to fire football coaches between January 2010 and January ’21.

Two in particular have consolidated power in the college coaching space: Jimmy Sexton of Creative Artists Agency and Trace Armstrong of Athletes First.

There is at least one high-level person in college sports who doesn’t seem to think this is a big deal: Sankey.

SEC coaches represented five of the top 10 coaching salaries in 2021.

In 2019 former Stanford golfer Kevin Blue authored a white paper entitled “Rising Expenses in College Athletics and the Non-Profit Paradox.”.

Unlike professional teams, college athletics departments do not have owners with a personal financial stake in the game.

On the other hand, financial decision-making in college athletics reflects the different set of incentives that the non-profit structure encourages.

While the current scale is unprecedented, the corporatization of college sports is, of course, nothing new.

Nothing came of it, and college athletics was allowed to continually run unabated to where it is now.

As Swarbrick noted in the press conference following Kelly’s exit: “We'd better be asking what we want college football to be and how we make sure it still fits inside a university environment.”?

The new norm we’ve arrived at may seem absurd, but Blue argues it was always going to get this way as college athletics ran unchecked.

Brian Kelly's contract with LSU -- $100 million over 10 years -- is the largest in the history of college football in total value.

And given what Blue and others posit and what fans across the country understand about athletics, regulation could include college sports leaders’ doing something that is the antithesis to the real goal: winning.

“Professional-level payouts for college coaches are only possible because colleges and the NCAA illegally collude to directly restrict compensation for the mostly Black athletes so that the mostly white coaches and industry executives get to keep all the profits for themselves

While athletes can finally make money off endorsements, it's clear we need to go further to right the wrongs at the core of the college sports industry.”

Murphy graduated with a law degree from UConn, which got rid of coach Randy Edsall early in the season and replaced him with former NFL and college head coach Jim Mora Jr

Many parties are at fault, but college sports are at a breaking point, wrapped up in an inflection point on top of a tipping point

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He was officially named the 30th head coach in program history on Friday