Where does Mike Gundy buyout at Oklahoma State rank among college football coaches?

5 hours ago7 min read

The college football coaching carousel of 2025 has spun with brutal financial consequences, creating a staggering landscape of fiscal carnage where being fired feels more like winning the lottery than professional failure. Since the season's kickoff, eleven FBS coaches have been handed their walking papers, with the combined buyout figure rocketing toward an almost incomprehensible $185 million, a number poised to smash through the $200 million barrier with ease.This isn't just a reset of programs; it's a fundamental recalibration of the cost of failure in America's most passionate sport. The heavy lifting in this astronomical sum comes from two titanic payouts: Brian Kelly's $53 million golden parachute from LSU and James Franklin's $49 million send-off from Penn State, figures that now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the legendary $76.8 million Jimbo Fisher extracted from Texas A&M as the most expensive divorces in the sport's history. They are joined by a cadre of other high-profile departures, including Billy Napier from Florida ($21 million), Hugh Freeze from Auburn ($15.4 million), and, squarely in the top five, Mike Gundy from Oklahoma State, whose $15 million buyout underscores the immense financial commitment—and risk—even historically stable programs are now willing to undertake. The full list of this season's fiscal fallout reads like a who's who of distressed programs: Sam Pittman (Arkansas, $9.3 million), Brent Pry (Virginia Tech, $6. 8 million), DeShaun Foster (UCLA, $6.4 million), Trent Bray (Oregon State, ~$4 million), Trent Dilfer (UAB, $3 million), and Jay Norvell (Colorado State, $1. 5 million).To put this in perspective, the combined buyouts for these eleven men could fund the entire athletic department of a mid-major university for a decade, a sobering thought in an era where the financial disparity between the haves and have-nots grows ever wider. This phenomenon isn't merely a product of escalating coaching salaries; it's a direct result of the arms race mentality that has consumed Power Four conferences, fueled by gargantuan media rights deals from the SEC and Big Ten that have created a winner-take-all environment.Athletic directors, facing immense pressure from boosters and fanbases to compete immediately in the new, sprawling conference landscapes, are writing contracts with increasingly aggressive guarantees and diminishing mitigation clauses, effectively betting the farm on a coach's ability to deliver instant success. The 'duty to mitigate' clause, which allows schools to offset buyout payments if a coach finds new employment, often provides little relief, as the sheer size of these initial guarantees ensures a multi-year financial anchor, hamstringing a program's ability to invest in facilities, support staff, and the burgeoning Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) collectives that are now essential for roster construction.The case of Mike Gundy at Oklahoma State is particularly instructive; after nearly two decades in Stillwater, building a consistent winner and becoming a program icon, his departure still carries a $15 million price tag, a testament to the long-term, high-security contracts necessary to retain coaching talent in the modern era. This financial reckoning forces a critical examination of the sustainability of the current model.Are these buyouts simply the cost of doing business in a multi-billion dollar industry, or are they a ticking time bomb that will eventually force a financial correction? As the sport continues to grapple with athlete employment status and revenue sharing, the sight of universities paying tens of millions to individuals *not* to coach, while simultaneously arguing against player salaries, creates a public relations chasm that is increasingly difficult to bridge. The 2025 coaching purge, with Mike Gundy's buyout sitting prominently in the top five, is more than a list of numbers; it is a stark data point in the ongoing story of college football's transformation from a collegiate pastime into a high-stakes, high-finance entertainment behemoth where the price of admission—and failure—has never been higher.

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#Mike Gundy

#Oklahoma State

#coaching buyouts

#college football

#fired coaches

#Brian Kelly

#James Franklin