The College Football Hot Seat Is Really About Buyouts Now

Halloween has not even arrived, and three Power Four schools have fired their head coaches in a single week. Maryland moved on from Mike Locksley after a 12th straight Big Ten loss, NC State fired Dave Doeren, its all-time wins leader, less than a day after a 31-28 loss at Stanford, and Baylor let Dave Aranda go after a one-point loss to Kansas. So the college football hot seat is officially open for business, and from what it seems, the next name to go will be decided by the size of the check as much as the record.

To be honest, that is the part of the college football hot seat conversation that fans tend to skip. Every struggling coach looks fireable on a Saturday night, but athletic directors look at buyouts on Sunday morning, and the numbers on this list are wildly different.

Greg Schiano has the cheapest way out

Rutgers sits at the top of the latest hot seat index, and it is hard to argue. The Scarlet Knights are 2-5 and 1-3 in the Big Ten after a 42-14 loss at Northwestern, and the season started with a 37-21 home loss to UMass, a team that came in as a 29-point underdog. Greg Schiano, the Rutgers head coach in his second stint, returned in 2020 and has watched another season start to slip away.

Ironically, Schiano did not even make a preseason top 10 list of coaches on the hot seat that included Aranda and Locksley. The omission shows how fast this season turned on him, and it also shows that nobody saw a UMass loss coming.

Here is why he is one of the likeliest next dominoes. His contract calls for roughly 77% of his remaining compensation if Rutgers fires him, and On3 estimates the cost at about $18.5 million after the season. The figure is real money for Rutgers, but it is cheap compared with what several other schools on this list would have to pay.

Lincoln Riley is too expensive to fire, for now

Lincoln Riley, the USC head coach, is the most interesting case on the board. USC is 6-2 and 3-2 in the Big Ten, which looks fine on paper. However, the Trojans just lost 24-7 at Wisconsin, and Ohio State, Indiana, and UCLA are still on the schedule, so a 7-5 finish is very much in play.

Be that as it may, firing Riley would be a roughly $70 million headache. He arrived from Oklahoma on a widely reported 10-year, $110 million deal, although USC has not confirmed the terms, and his buyout has been estimated at about $70 million. Very few schools in America would write that check in October, especially for a coach who is still four games over .500.

Meanwhile, the rumor mill has done something strange. Riley’s name has been floated as a candidate for the Baylor opening, the same job that opened over the weekend. We can’t really say for sure if that is serious, but it could offer both sides a cleaner exit than USC simply firing him and paying the reported buyout.

The College Football hot seat wild cards

Sonny Dykes, the TCU head coach, is the hardest one to read. TCU is 3-4 and 1-3 in the Big 12 after a 24-20 home loss to West Virginia, and Dykes fired co-offensive coordinator and offensive line coach A.J. Ricker after that game. The losses started back in Dublin, where North Carolina beat TCU 15-10 in the opener, and they never really stopped.

But here is the catch. TCU gave Dykes an extension in April, and since TCU is a private school, nobody outside the building knows what his buyout looks like. He also took TCU to the national title game in 2022, and that kind of credit lasts longer than one bad October.

Elsewhere, Mike Norvell is 3-4 at Florida State with a buyout above $51 million, and Deion Sanders is 2-5 at Colorado after a 57-24 loss at Oklahoma State, with a reported $26 million buyout. In both cases, the money is the biggest thing standing between those coaches and the door.

So here is the bottom line, at least from where we sit. The college football hot seat comes down to who a school can afford to replace, and Schiano has one of the lower publicly reported buyouts among these coaches. The twist is that his estimated buyout drops to $11.7 million after the 2027 season, so Rutgers has to decide whether one more losing year is worth saving close to $7 million.