Another Football Coach Gets Another Huge Payday for Doing Nothing

We have covered this kind of thing before. It happened in Nebraska. It happened in North Carolina. It happened in Connecticut. It happened in Texas. It hasn’t happened in Kansas, where the UK basketball coach has a lifetime contract that pays him $13 million/year, but that salary is outrageous enough for a public employee. I wrote about this very contract when responding to people who thought it scandalous that the federal government paid Anthony Fauci over $400,000/year to combat infectious diseases. Things like this probably happen in every state. We just can’t cover them all.

According to Bruce Feldman, Ralph Russo and Christopher Kamrani, writing for The Athletic (The New York Times’ sports pages), Louisiana State University (LSU) made a $95 million bet on Brian Kelly four years ago. LSU lured Mr. Kelly away from his position at Notre Dame with a ten-year, $95 million contract. Just to give some sense of how absolutely insane that salary is, consider this. As of 2023, the State of Louisiana had roughly 3000 employees. The average employee earned slightly less than $60,000, so less than 1/150th of Mr. Kelly’s annual salary, an annual salary that he will continue to receive for another six years for doing nothing, unless his duty to mitigate kicks in.

Mr. Kelly does not appear on the list of state employees. I’m not sure why. Likely because his salary is paid through private donations, but those are private donations that are offsetting LSU’s obligation to pay its coaching staff. The President of the University of Louisiana system, who oversees operations on nine campuses, is nominally the highest paid state employee. He earns less than 1/15 of the head football coach. The Governor of Louisiana gets paid a salary of $130,000, which is pretty paltry, but even the highest paid governor in the country (New York) only makes double that or 1/38th of Mr. Kelly’s salary which, in case I didn’t already mention this, he will continue to earn for an additional six years, for doing nothing, unless his duty to mitigate kicks in.

When Mr. Kelly was hired, everything seemed propitious. LSU had won national championships under its three previous head coaches. Mr. Kelly came from Notre Dame, where his team won 113 games in twelve seasons, but he had never won a Division I national championship. It seemed like a perfect marriage of a football-dominated sports culture and a celebrated and successful coach still hungry for an elusive crowning achievement.

It didn’t work out. Notre Dame without Mr. Kelly is doing far better than LSU with him. Perhaps coaches are not magicians. At LSU, according to The Athletic, cultures clashed, and Mr. Kelly did not make the adjustment. The team performed solidly in its first three years. The team’s record under Mr. Kelly was 29-11 going into the 2025 season. Expectations were once again high for the Tigers, as they had spent $18 million on NIL contracts to recruit a top-tier team. At the time of Mr. Kelly’s termination, the team had won five games and lost three.

Peter Thamel reports for ESPN that LSU has acknowledged that it fired Mr. Kelly “without cause,” entitling him to his $54 million payout. I’ve seen worse. Mr. Kelly’s contract obligates him to make “good-faith, reasonable, and sustained efforts to obtain qualifying employment for as long as liquidated damages are due.” I’m not sure what counts as “qualifying employment,” but all of the bad publicity regarding Mr. Kelly’s tenure at LSU will not make it easy for him, at age 64, to find a new head coach position. That is especially true as it is becoming increasingly clear that the job of head football coach is changing as students come with agents and some savvy about shopping around for the best deal. Even after they commit, they can head to the transfer portal if they don’t get what they are looking for. Dealing with 18-year-old egos and hormones, as well as their parents and their agents, calls for a different personality than the traditional “walk-it-off” mentality once associated with successful college coaching.

LSU has also fired its Athletic Director, responsible for hiring Mr. Kelly. He will be entitled to a $6 million contractual buyout, subject to mitigation. So that’s $60 million total. And yes, the $60 million, if it gets paid, will not come (directly) from Louisiana taxpayers. It will come from donors.

But imagine if those donors could be induced to give to other causes associated with education. For what it’s worth, despite three national college football championships this century, the U.S. News and World Report ranks Louisiana 50th among U.S. states. It ranks 50th for its economy. US News ranks it 46th in education. It also ranks 50th in health. Imagine where it would without those three national championships. I imagine it would be in exactly the same place, because successful sports program only raise revenues for more sports programs. And as college athletics slips rapidly into professionalization, the price tag for college sports programs will only increase, with no change in the impact of such programs on the state’s overall well-being.

Now imagine where Louisiana would rank if, instead of pouring tens of millions of dollars each year into its football programs, it poured that money into economic development, environmental clean-up and clean energy, infrastructure, and recruitment of top educators and researchers to prepare the current generation for the challenges ahead. Countries with the best standards of living include Luxembourg, Netherlands, Denmark, Oman, Switzerland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Austria. Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden. What do these countries have in common. I’m not sure, but one thing I know is that none of them have ever won a college football championship. So maybe we should look to other ways to spend our money to improve our communities.