Midseason firings escalate college football buyouts | JQJO

College football’s coaching carousel accelerated: UCLA’s DeShaun Foster and Virginia Tech’s Brent Pry were out after three weeks, and within seven more, a half-dozen high-profile firings followed. A quarter of SEC coaches are gone, as are longtime James Franklin and Mike Gundy. Buyouts for dismissed head and assistant coaches swelled to about $185 million by Week 10, prompting warnings of unsustainable spending. While Texas’s Steve Sarkisian calls big contracts the price of doing business, experts and attorneys foresee shorter, incentive-based deals ahead, even as coaches like Ryan Day accept constant change as the job.