On September 15, 2018, the Florida Gators will welcome the Colorado State Rams to the Swamp. It will be one of the most awkward home games in UF Football history.
The new Florida head coach will do the game planning and answer the media’s questions about it, but a Jim McElwain-shaped cloud will hang over the proceedings. The entire reason why the game is being played is that it’s a part of the deal that brought Coach Mac to Gainesville.
When Jeremy Foley pursued his quarry three years ago, one of the sticking points was McElwain’s $7.5 million buyout. To this day, it remains one of the largest buyouts ever paid by one school to pluck a coach from another.
Foley successfully kept his pursuit and hire of Will Muschamp secret until the final hours, but he chose to make the negotiations with Colorado State public. He did so to gain leverage by making it untenable for McElwain to remain at the school. Part of the creative deal to pay the ransom was to fork over $2 million to bring the Rams to Florida Field in 2018.
This time around, Scott Stricklin has a lot more promising candidates to choose from than were around in the winter of 2014 for Foley. If you go back and look at that year’s hires, it was a better year to be a Group of Five school hiring an up-and-comer than a power program looking for the next big thing.
One factor that makes this year’s crop appealing is that the buyouts are not terribly high for most of the coaches that Stricklin would reasonably consider.
Of the head coaches commonly mentioned in media reports and speculation about the job, only one is known to have a buyout at or above McElwain’s old one. It would take $9.4 million to hire Matt Campbell away from Iowa State this winter. The rest go down from there.
A few names have buyouts that aren’t known. Dan Mullen’s buyout to leave Mississippi State hasn’t been publicly reported, while SMU’s Chad Morris and Syracuse’s Dino Babers work at private schools that don’t have to release contracts. Of them, only Mullen’s is likely to be hefty. He makes over $4.5 million a year in Starkville, and a salary that high often (though not always) comes with a large penalty for leaving.
Among candidates that would excite Gator fans, one likely has no buyout at all: Chip Kelly. It’s not yet known whether he’s interested in the Florida job. It’s also unknown whether UF would hire someone whose last college tenure ended with an NCAA failure to monitor charge, three years of probation, and an 18-month show cause penalty. There probably is a clause in Kelly’s contract at ESPN that lets him out if he gets a coaching job, so if interest is mutual, it probably wouldn’t cost anything to get him out of Bristol.
Of the remaining coaches that are suspected to be on the vetting list, Memphis’s Mike Norvell is the most affordable. It would only take $500,000 to get him out of his deal.
UCF’s Scott Frost and Oregon’s Willie Taggart are two other names that have come up frequently in these early days of the search. Florida could buy them both out for less than it paid for McElwain, as they each require $3 million to leave their current jobs. Taggart’s successor at USF, Charlie Strong, is a little below them at $2.5 million.
Having Minnesota’s P.J. Fleck row his boat down to Gainesville would be more pricey at $4.2 million. Purdue’s Jeff Brohm, who looked more attractive before he lost to Rutgers, is even more expensive. He’d cost either $5.9 million before December 5 or $4.9 million after.
Virginia Tech’s Justin Fuente comes in at $6 million, the second-highest among the reasonable potential candidates. It’s a big ask, but he also did an amazing job in raising Memphis up from the bottom of FBS to become one of the better mid-majors and has won big immediately in Blacksburg.
Given that Campbell has only spent three years of his entire life outside the state of Ohio, Florida may cross him off the list for recruiting reasons despite his big wins this year and at Toledo. Urban Meyer was an Ohio guy too, but he recruited the state of Florida at Notre Dame. He had an understanding of what the recruiting battle in the area was like that Campbell doesn’t.
If the lack of local recruiting ties or the steep price tag crosses Campbell off the list — and, without having sources, I would guess one or both factors will — then the next coach will cost Florida less to bring in than McElwain did. For an athletic department with big facilities plans in the works, that helps.
And, ideally, if the deal to pay the new coach’s buyout again involves scheduling a game against his former school four years down the road, he’ll still be here to coach in it.