'Crazy not to feel the pressure:' Not all college football coaches cash in when fired

By the time Joe Osovet learned he wasn’t going to be retained as the tight ends coach at Tennessee under Josh Heupel in early February, it was so late in the assistant coaching churn that few comparable jobs were available.

“This carousel goes from now up until the (American Football Coaches Association) convention, and then all the spots are pretty much filled,” Osovet told USA TODAY Sports. “You’ll get some turnover because of the NFL but it’s not a lot. It’s hard the later this thing goes to find a quality gig at a level you want to be at.”

Osovet, who had bought a house in Knoxville shortly before Jeremy Pruitt got fired, wasn’t entirely in the lurch. With a year left on his contract at Tennessee that was set to pay him $250,000 for a year starting Feb. 1, he could stay patient while spending more time with his wife and two children after coaching continuously since 1995, largely at the junior college level.

“Talking to so many people in the industry, they were like, 'Treat this as a blessing,' " Osovet said. “You want to give your family as much stability as you can.”

But unlike Football Bowl Subdivision head coaches, where getting fired often comes with a multimillion-dollar windfall, their assistants generally can’t afford to go sit on a beach for very long. For someone like Osovet, who was working on a two-year deal that is considered standard for assistant coaches these days, the buyout is merely a buffer to help them survive until the next job comes around.

“If you’re a head coach who has one of these multi-million dollar deals, those guys aren’t under any pressure to automatically coach again,” said Nick Meeker, an agent at Coaches Inc., which represents around two dozen FBS assistants. “But for 90-plus percent of the coaching world, especially assistants, even if they have another year on their contract they are stressed out and doing everything they can from Day 1 to land another job immediately because they know if they sit out another year the chances of getting back in go way downhill.”

Among those who benefit most when assistant coaches jump back into new jobs immediately is the school that fired them.

See salaries for assistant college football coaches through the years

With nearly all assistant coaching contracts including offset language that reduces their buyout by the amount of the salary at their next job, schools that change coaching staffs are rarely on the hook for the full amount of what’s owed on the contract. Though those dollar figures are still growing right alongside head coaching salaries, the amount ultimately owed to assistants isn’t an impediment for major schools in replacing a coaching staff.

“I don’t think people really think about it very much,” an administrator at a Power Five school that recently made a coaching change told USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic. “We did the math on it and projected pretty conservatively. Roughly half we won't have to worry about a buyout. There are a couple guys I don’t feel great about (finding new jobs at the same pay scale) so we planned to absorb a significant portion of those (contracts) that have a year left.”

In all this season, assistant coaches compensation averaged just over $320,000, according to a USA TODAY Sports analysis. Not including pandemic-related pay reductions that some coaches have still been taking, there were 34 assistant coaches scheduled to make at least $1 million this season and 66 to make at least $800,000. Those counts each have roughly doubled since 2017.

Cutting the costs

That’s not unusual in this era of college football. In fact, of five power conference schools that changed coaches after the 2020 season, 33 of the 55 assistants from those staffs were either retained by the new coach or found a job at another FBS school while 10 landed on NFL coaching staffs and two were hired as high school head coaches. Just 10 of the 55 did not coach in 2021.

Though not every one of them is making the same salary as their previous job — in fact, many aren’t — a USA TODAY Sports analysis shows how schools rely on mitigation clauses to bring down the often exorbitant amounts they are obligated to pay for buyouts to assistants.

At Texas, for instance, where the buyout bill for nine assistant coaches that weren’t retained from Tom Herman’s staff was about $10.2 million on paper, the actual amount the school would have paid this year is far less.

For that, Texas can thank schools like Alabama, which is paying cornerbacks coach Jay Valai’s $525,000 this year — more than the buyout on his contract — while others such as Central Florida (where offensive line coach Herb Hand landed), Purdue (co-defensive coordinator Mark Hagen) and Ole Miss (special teams coordinator Coleman Hutzler) found similar jobs at smaller salaries.

The difference between their Texas buyout and their new contract is what Texas actually owes. For those four assistants, the new jobs reduced Texas’ obligation by $1.055 million. Moreover, Texas’ biggest buyout was committed to offensive coordinator Mike Yurcich, who signed a three-year deal in 2020 paying him $1.7 million annually. Though Texas still owed Yurcich $3.825 million over two years when he was fired, he landed almost immediately at Penn State as the offensive coordinator.

It’s unclear how much Penn State is paying Yurcich, as state open-records law does not require the school to make its employment agreements public, and the school told USA TODAY Sports it would not release term sheets for assistants. But a fair market salary for Yurcich would likely have reduced his Texas buyout to a fraction of what it would be otherwise.

When Auburn made a change last year, the roughly $8.4 million owed to assistants was almost as shocking as the $21.45 million it owed to Gus Malzahn. In reality, Auburn got $860,000 worth of relief when defensive coordinator Kevin Steele took a job briefly at Tennessee and Jack Bicknell Jr. was hired as offensive line coach at Louisville for $425,000, just $116,667 less than his Auburn buyout figure. Kodi Burns going to Tennessee as receivers coach saved another $300,000.

The vast majority of Auburn’s remaining buyout money is tied up in Steele, who had two years and $5 million left on his deal, and offensive coordinator Chad Morris, who had two years and about $1.5 million remaining. Steele did not coach in 2021, and Morris is now the head coach at Allen High School in Texas where he is making an estimated $124,000, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Trying to get fired

The short-term nature of these contracts, combined with the uncertainties of the coaching job market, can land in some interesting gray areas that create friction between agents and schools and sometimes the schools themselves when the second employer tries to get a coach on the cheap, knowing the buyout will make up the difference.

This was a point of contention, for instance, when Charlie Strong was fired at Texas and immediately landed at South Florida. Several of the assistants that came with him, including offensive coordinator Sterlin Gilbert and offensive line coach Matt Mattox, made $100,000 their first two years with the Texas buyout subsidizing the rest of what they would have made with the Longhorns.

See salaries for college football coaches through the years

In response, schools are increasingly trying to write assistant coaching contracts in ways that avoid such arrangements by demanding the pay at their next job line up with fair market value. But for some coaches, the best career move might be taking a low-paying analyst position at a place like Alabama or Clemson, which does not mitigate much for the initial school. And even the definition of fair market value can be up for debate, depending on the school and situation.

This year, for instance, Illinois was on the hook for a combined total of just over $375,000 in buyout money between Bowling Green special teams coordinator Bob Ligashesky and Western Kentucky cornerbacks coach Keynodo Hudson, who each accepted jobs at those schools for $50,000. Similarly situated assistants at those schools earn between $70,000 and $125,000, but that doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story.

“A lot of times the first employer will get upset and say, 'Hey, second school isn’t paying the guy as much as they should and you’re cutting him a deal,' ” Meeker said. “But at the end of the day, you can't lose sight of the fact that if the coach didn’t take that job, you don’t know the inner workings of what's going on at the second school and how much they have left in their assistant pool. So if he didn’t get that job, you might still be paying the full amount.”

Some of the lower-revenue schools are more aggressive about trying to avoid buyouts by reassigning assistant coaches or demoting them and hoping they’ll leave on their own.

One agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it involved an ongoing negotiation, described a current situation in which an assistant coach has been told he won’t be retained by the new coach but cannot take a coaching job at a lower level until he’s officially off the staff or else he’ll forfeit a significant amount of buyout money.

“I’m actively trying to get him fired so it makes it more digestible,” the agent said. “A lot of times ADs will play this game of chicken where they don’t fire you even though the new coach has no intention of keeping you on so they’ll just wait to see if you go get something so it’s off their books.”

'It's a wicked cycle'

In many ways, Osovet has found value in spending time at home this year, coaching his son’s 6-year-old Little League team and reserving a portion of every day to work on a “virtual playbook” of pass protections and running game schemes to keep his mind sharp. But as Jan. 31 looms when his Tennessee contract runs out and the paychecks stop coming in, Osovet spends more time following the coaching carousel and figuring out where his next opportunity might come from.

“I get a tweet notification every time Football Scoop goes off,” he said of the Web site that primarily tracks coaching moves. “You’re trying to be ahead of the game, connect dots, figure out how you can get to this head coach or who you know that might help you get someone on the phone. It’s a wicked cycle.”

And a stressful one, too, even for a coach known as an offensive innovator and lead recruiter on a trio of four-star prospects. He even wonders whether he should have taken the opportunity to stay at Tennessee as an analyst because of the difficulty that coaches sometimes have getting back in after a year away.

“You’d be crazy not to feel the pressure,” he said.

It’s one of the reasons that assistant coaches often jump from job to job — not just to make more money or land at a better school, but because they always start to feel that squeeze in the last year of a contract.

“When you’re in a position where you have to find something, life is so much more stressful in this industry than if you know you have a fallback plan or that you’re still taken care of if you can’t find something,” said Osovet’s agent, Bryan Blair.

In that sense, the buyouts being paid to a majority of assistant coaches are more important to their livelihoods than the multi-million dollar figures we’re seeing head coaches collect — even if it’s mostly an afterthought to the schools.

At the end of the day, the most important thing for the agent is to make sure their client is made whole on that last year of the contract, regardless of which school is paying it.

“It’s important for them to have that security blanket,” Meeker said. “We are going to do everything we can to help them get a new job, but it doesn’t always work out and you’d much rather have that security of knowing you'll be paid even if you’re not able to find a job in the upcoming year.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: College football coaches' pay: Not all cash in on buyout when fired