Recession hasn’t yet cut college football coach buyout packages

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When Auburn head football coach Tommy Tuberville departed earlier this month, he left with a $5.08 million buyout package.

When head football coach Tommy Bowden left Clemson in October, he left with a $3.5 million buyout.

Recession? Not, it seems, on big-time football campuses. At least, not when influential alumni deem it time for a coach to go, no matter that he’s still got time left on his contract.

There still seems to be plenty of money left to grease the skids.

When I recently asked The Times’ college football guru Chris Dufresne to name a few coaches who’ve left in recent years with a buyout, it took him all of five minutes to respond with a dozen names.

Buyouts, which are spelled out in coaches’ contracts, aren’t likely to disappear in the near future, according to a pair of economists who study sports.

‘There may be some additional scrutiny of coaches’ contracts, and some minor tweaks for PR purposes, but the underlying dynamics will remain the same and so will the results,’ said Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist, whose most recent sports-oriented book is titled ‘Equal Pay: Title IX and Social Change.’

‘You’ll have to get to the point where actual demand for college sports goes way down before the buyouts go away,’ said David Berri, an economics professor at Southern Utah University and a contributor to The Sports Economist.

‘And, as long as the money is there, it’s going to flow to the coaches,’ Berri said. ‘The thing to remember about college sports is that they don’t pay the workers -- the players. So it all goes to the coaches.’

-- Greg Johnson