It pays to be a fired college football or basketball coach these days. Of course, it does pay well to be an actually employed college basketball or football coach, but sometimes not as well as the handsome buyout one gets for being shown the door—which often rivals or exceeds the contracts of coaches currently pacing the sidelines.

Oh, what backward math.

We’ve seen plenty of examples of calculator-busting buyouts over the years from basketball to football. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and recount some of the biggest coaching buyouts across both sports.

College football’s 10 largest coaching buyouts of all time

Honorable mentions

In the first coaching dismissal of the 2026 college football season, Maryland has parted ways with coach Mike Locksley after eight seasons and a 39-54 record. Locksley is due a buyout of roughly $9.6 million, which doesn't quite tip the scales on our list, but is still worth noting as the sport kicks off hot-seat season.

Penn State fired James Franklin in October 2025, triggering the third-largest buyout in the history of the sport at a whopping $48.6 million. But as Franklin’s talks with Virginia Tech intensified (he would go on to become the school’s head coach), he and the Nittany Lions negotiated a much smaller payout of $9 million.

Even without Franklin included, these are some truly staggering numbers. And while the top-line numbers listed above are in some cases more than what the coaches were actually awarded via payouts, fired coaches in the 2025 season alone—including Kelly, Stoops, Franklin and Napier—combined to net $224 million via buyouts and settlements, according to The Athletic.

So how in the heck do schools afford these buyouts? Well, some of them will be mitigated over time should a coach (such as Kelly) get hired by another school, much in the way Franklin’s buyout was reduced. Other schools opt to dole out the buyouts in yearly payments stretched out over time, like deferred payments in baseball. Stoops’s buyout with Kentucky is one such arrangement, in which he’ll be paid $6.75 million annually through April 2031. These payments are much more palatable than ripping the whole Band-Aid off, but they’re still costly to an athletic department. Case in point: If you’re scoring at home, yes, that means that Stoops stands to earn more to not coach Kentucky than new coach Will Stein stands to earn actually coaching Kentucky.

The math doesn’t math.

Men’s college basketball’s 10 largest coaching buyouts of all time

Honorable mentions

There are several large numbers not listed above for various reasons.

Kansas State’s Jerome Tang, who was fired this past February, would have boasted the largest buyout in college basketball history at $18.7 million save for some pesky language in his contract that moved the Wildcats to fire him for cause in an attempt to avoid the buyout. Tang has since hired legal representation, a lawsuit was filed, and the former Kansas State basketball coach in Oct. reached a settlement with the university that includes a $12 million payment.

In March 2018, UConn fired basketball coach Kevin Ollie amid an NCAA investigation into recruiting violations, and refused to pay Ollie’s buyout due to the violations. Ollie took the Huskies to court where he won a $3.9 million settlement on top of the $11.1 million he netted when an arbitrator ruled he was “improperly fired.”

Then, in the cases of ex-Vanderbilt coach Jerry Stackhouse (fired in 2024) and ex-Providence coach Kim English (fired in 2026), varying numbers have been reported. Stackhouse’s buyout was rumored to be in the $15 million range, which would be the highest ever for a men's college basketball coach. However, Vanderbilt, a private institution, has kept the numbers close to the vest. Tax records from 2024 show that Stackhouse was paid $3.4 million in “other reportable compensation” during the ‘24 season, the year he was fired. That would seem to suggest a payout, though it’s not clear whether it was a lump sum agreement or a series of installed payments toward a greater number.

In English’s case, reports indicated that his buyout was in the $6–9 million neighborhood, but no concrete number has ever surfaced.

The buyouts paid to men's college basketball coaches pale in comparison to their college football counterparts, but they are still troublesome to the bottom lines of universities. Maryland went into the red while footing the $5 million bill for fired basketball coach Mark Turgeon, who was dismissed back in 2021. Indiana, thanks to a wealthy booster, was able to pay fired coach Archie Miller's $10.3 million buyout in that same year.

So the numbers may be smaller in college basketball, but athletic departments are still forced to do financial gymnastics to make the math work. And it's only going to get worse with buyouts soaring ever higher in today’s college athletics landscape.

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