Hot Seat: The Price of Patience
Updated: Oct 31
It's only the end of September, and all eyes are already on athletic directors' offices. In Tallahassee, Mike Norvell reassured no one by beating New Mexico State and Central Arkansas. In Columbia, Shane Beamer may be living through the toughest weeks of his tenure. Elsewhere, from Norman to Madison, several coaches already know that eight-figure contracts no longer guarantee patience.
That's the paradox of today's college football. Contracts protect head coaches like rarely before, and yet schools' patience seems shorter than ever. One explanation is the transfer portal, which has shortened the time it takes to revive a program. Indiana with Curt Cignetti, Florida with Jon Sumrall and UCLA with Bob Chesney each prove it in their own way.
Ever bigger checks
The 2025 season will go down as the most expensive ever for firings. Fifteen FBS head coaches lost their jobs, and their combined contractual buyouts topped $228 million, nearly $100 million more than the previous high. LSU committed to pay Brian Kelly about $54 million, Kentucky owed Mark Stoops $38 million, Michigan State owed Jonathan Smith $33 million and Florida owed Billy Napier $21 million. Penn State owed James Franklin close to $49 million, but his hiring at Virginia Tech brought the bill down to $9 million.
That last example shows how much one legal detail matters: offset language. When it's in the contract, the school pays less if the former coach finds a new job. When it isn't, the full amount is due, sometimes very quickly. Napier was set to receive half of his buyout within a month of being fired.
This year, too, some coaches under pressure are shielded by staggering sums. Firing Riley would cost USC between $72 million and $80 million by most estimates, since the private university doesn't publish its contracts. Clemson would owe Dabo Swinney $57 million, with no offset language at all. Florida State still owes Norvell more than $45 million, or 85% of what's left on his deal, an amount that, according to Sports Illustrated, weighed in the decision to give him one more season, especially since it drops every year. Belichick, for his part, was guaranteed $30 million of his five-year, $50 million contract.
Still, 2025 proved that no buyout is now too big to stop a determined school. The record still belongs to Texas A&M, which paid Jimbo Fisher $76 million in 2023, and LSU didn't hesitate to come close two years later. The calendar also pushes schools to decide early. With the early signing period and a single transfer window in January, decisions are now made as early as October, and nearly all of them are wrapped up before December.
Shane Beamer, the hottest case
At South Carolina, Shane Beamer's situation sums up the dilemma perfectly. Heading into his sixth season in charge of the Gamecocks, he carried a losing overall record of 30-33 and was coming off a 4-8 season with a single SEC win. He admitted it himself this summer: in this conference, one bad year is enough to put you on the hot seat.
The start of the season hasn't helped. South Carolina is 2-2 with no conference wins, after a second-half collapse against Mississippi State and a heavy 49-18 loss at Alabama, where the Gamecocks already trailed by 32 points at halftime. It's their seventh straight SEC loss. Athletic director Jeremiah Donati, who didn't hire him, spoke with him the day after the loss. His buyout stands at $27.9 million if he's fired before the end of the season, then drops to $22.1 million on December 31. A significant sum, but far from the figures that paralyze Clemson or Southern California.
Indiana, proof that anything is possible
If athletic directors now dare to pay fortunes to start over, it's first and foremost because of Bloomington. When Curt Cignetti arrived in December 2023, Indiana held the unwanted record for the most losses in college football history and had won just nine of its last 27 games. Thirteen of his James Madison players made the move with him.
What followed reads like a fairy tale. In 2024, the Hoosiers went 11-2 and reached the playoff for the first time. In 2025, they didn't lose a single game: a Big Ten title, the Rose Bowl, then a 27-21 win over Miami on January 19, 2026, for the program's first national championship. You have to go back to Yale in 1894 to find a team at the top level of college football that won 16 games without a loss in a single season.
The secret? Betting on players who had already proven themselves rather than on high school recruiting promise. Quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who arrived from Cal without much of a résumé, became the showcase of that approach. Indiana rewarded its coach with a $93 million contract through 2033, and the formula continues: 17 transfers arrived this winter, including Josh Hoover from TCU. The message to the rest of the country is clear: if Indiana could do it, any well-run program can too.
Florida, an investment already paying off
In October 2025, Florida agreed to pay $21 million to move on from Billy Napier, fired after a 3-4 start with a 22-23 record. The Gators finished the year 4-8. To replace him, the school made a choice similar to Indiana's: a coach who had won everywhere without passing through the big stages. Jon Sumrall had gone 23-4 with two Sun Belt titles at Troy, then 20-8 with a playoff berth at Tulane.
Four games later, Florida is unbeaten, with two SEC wins including a victory at Auburn. The Gators have scored at least 44 points in every game, and last Saturday they routed Ole Miss, then ranked fourth in the country, 52-28, rushing for more than 300 yards. Jadan Baugh ran for three touchdowns. Led by quarterback Aaron Philo and offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner, the Gators are now ranked eighth nationally and are off to their best start since 2019. There's a long way to go, but Napier's buyout is already starting to look less like an expense and more like the price of a fresh start.
UCLA, the boldest bet
In Westwood, the rebuild looked even bigger. UCLA parted ways with DeShaun Foster after the third loss of the 2025 season, then finished 3-9. To bounce back, the Bruins hired Bob Chesney, who won 21 games in two seasons at James Madison, with a Sun Belt title and a playoff berth in 2025. Chesney then rebuilt almost the entire roster: 40 players signed in 15 days during the January transfer window, including 10 who had played for him at James Madison.
The bet is working so far. UCLA is 4-0 and crushed Maryland 54-3 on Saturday. According to the school's official notes, it's the program's largest margin of victory ever in a Big Ten game. Chesney thus matches the best start by a first-year Bruins coach since Henry "Red" Sanders in 1949. Caution is still in order. Both conference wins came against modest opponents, and the passing game around Nico Iamaleava still lacks consistency. The real verdict will come in November, against the top of the Big Ten. But going from 3-9 to a winning season in a single winter would already prove what the portal makes possible.
The real price of patience
Ten years ago, changing coaches meant accepting three or four seasons of rebuilding, the time it took to recruit high school players and let a class grow up. That delay protected sitting coaches almost as much as their contracts did. That safety net is gone. Two weeks of transfers in January are now enough to reshape a roster, and a new coach often arrives with his staff and a handful of players who already know his system.
So the question schools ask has changed. They no longer ask only how much a firing would cost, but how much one more season with the wrong man in charge would cost them. Massive buyouts will keep saving some coaches, at least until the end of the fall. But Indiana, Florida and UCLA remind every struggling program, from Columbia to Tallahassee, that a turnaround is no longer measured in decades, but sometimes in a single winter.
