TEXAS A&M boosters have more money than god
Texas A&M trounced Mississippi State last Saturday, winning by 41 points at home. That, however, is not the headline. Following the game, Texas A$M announced that they had fired Head Coach Jimbo Fisher. This is absolutely crazy. Texas A$M is paying Jimbo Fisher over $77M dollars TO NOT COACH their team. This kind of money is just insane. Jimbo Fisher is guaranteed all $77M of that money and will be paid out in annual installments of over $7M until the year 2031.
The first thing I would like to do is to hire Jimbo Fisher’s agent for my next contract… This is the best deal of all time. It’s up there with the Bobby Bonilla and Ken Griffey Jr. contracts. Bobby Bonilla day will now be an after thought. Welcome Jimbo Fisher day. Someone has done the math on his payouts and reported that Jimbo is earning over $20,000 per day… to breathe. Absolutely exceptional. This may be the end of the long term guarantee contracts that were so popular. I don’t see any schools agreeing to this anymore after this.
First, it sounds crazy, but all the credit to the Texas A$M boosters for ponying up the dough. I knew it was inevitable that Jimbo was going to be fired, but candidly I thought this would happen after another two years when his buyout dropped by almost $20M. The boosters said NOPE! Fuck that! We’re getting this motherfucker out right now! Take my money! The program and boosters were unhappy with the state of the program and so they acted upon it, regardless of how much it was going to cost them. Good for them. This is a school and a program that is placing football first and placing a high premium on winning and success. As a college football fan, I love this. This encapsulates the love, passion and ferocity of which college football is built on.
So now the school is out $77M dollars to a coach that will no longer be on campus AND they will have to scrape up some dough to pay their new coach… Just an insane amount of money that is flowing through this program. This is the highest buyout in history and trumps the 2nd largest by over $50M with Gus Malzahn at Auburn. I believe there is not another program in the country that would execute a buyout of this volume. I just simply don’t think the resources and money exist at other programs to do this.
The Texas A$M opening is an interesting one though. It will certainly be a highly coveted job and there will be some big names in the ring for this job. Let’s look at the surface; inheriting top 5 roster composite in the sport, money grows on trees (or oil), facilities are top notch, hot bed for recruiting, SEC exposure, Divisions going away to alleviate playing Bama and LSU on an annual basis… The list goes on. There are a ton of things to like here.
Let’s take this shiny object out of the light for a second though and start asking some questions. With the exception of the divisions going away, all of this has been true about A$M for a while now. Why haven’t they seen the success? The easy answer is to point to the hires. Kevin Sumlin and Jimbo Fisher not being the right people for the job. Well, are the people who made those hiring decisions going to be making the hiring decisions for the next hire?
How influential are the boosters? Obviously, Texas A$M AD Ross Bjork can go to the well for money whenever he wants, but is that a double edge sword? Do the boosters have too much control over the decisions? I’m not around the program so I’m not privy to this information, however on the surface it looks as though despite all the resources and talent on the roster, it’s proven to be a difficult place to win. In baseball, there is a notion that organizations like to hire younger managers so that they can have more control over them whereas the older managers demand full control. I wonder if there is a bit of that going on with the boosters. Are they demanding some control that are leading to poor decisions and poor hires? Again, this is purely speculation. I have absolutely zero proof of anything like that being the case. I just think it’s curious to have everything at your fingertips; resources that 99% of the sport dream of, a talent roster that 99% of the sport dream of and still struggle to get 8 wins.
I hope this hire is figured out and they get the right guy. I am rooting for A$M to get this right and have some new blood be a contender in the sport!
