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Why it feels like Jimbo Fisher has coached his last game at the FBS level
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Jimbo Fisher has 76 million reasons to never coach another football game.
That buyout is not only a defining element of his time as a head coach, but it’s a defining element of the buyout boom in college football. While that buyout is still the ultimate outlier in the sport — it’s more than $55 million richer than any other paid buyout at the FBS level — it serves as a cautionary tale. Giving a coach a blank check doesn’t guarantee success, even for one with a national title already under his belt.
In 2025, Fisher will have his second season away from coaching. He’ll likely continue to do occasional interviews, just as he did last year with regular appearances on Sirius XM’s “Off Campus” with 2 of his former players, Jacob Hester and E.J. Manuel. In October, he’ll turn 60 years old.
Dare I say, it feels like we’ve seen the last of Fisher coaching on a college football sideline.
We know that Fisher didn’t pull off a move like Gus Malzahn, who received what’s now the second-largest buyout ever for an FBS head coach after he was fired by Auburn in 2020. Malzahn, who’ll also turn 60 years old in October, made the surprising decision to take on another head coaching opportunity at UCF. Four years later, go figure that Malzahn is now in the same Florida State offensive coordinator role that Fisher once held.
Malzahn was willing to take on an assistant role for the first time in 14 years. Given how few head coaching jobs Fisher has been linked to the last 2 years — even the West Virginia job back in his home state went to ex-coach Rich Rodriguez — one has to wonder how many of those opportunities are out there. Fisher going the assistant route for the first time since his FSU days 16 years ago feels … unlikely.
He can deny it all he wants, but there’s also ego at play there. In Fisher’s final season at Texas A&M, he struggled to publicly declare that Bobby Petrino was the team’s play-caller. Fisher even insisted on keeping his own terminology instead of letting Petrino have full control to install his offense.
When someone like Fisher has been in that role for the previous quarter century, it’s understandable why there’s resistance. The last 3 coaches that Fisher worked under were the late Bobby Bowden (as the coach-in-waiting), Les Miles (for 2 years before taking the same position at FSU) and Nick Saban (who clearly had a rivalry that lasted into the 2020s).
Now picture Fisher working for some coach who’s young enough to be his son. I can’t.
There’s also something else that needs to be asked if an FBS program would overlook Fisher failing to have a top-30 scoring offense during his last 4 seasons as A&M’s play-caller (2019-22).
Why take a coordinator job when you’ve got 76 million reasons not to?
Maybe that’s too simple, but that’s perfectly fair to wonder. If being a coach in this transfer portal/NIL is considered such a year-round grind that it’s forcing people out who have already made tens of millions of dollars coaching, wouldn’t it also keep someone like Fisher out?
At A&M, Fisher didn’t exactly lean into the new world of discussing NIL openly. It’s what ignited that back-and-forth spat with Saban after Fisher’s historic No. 1 class at A&M in 2022. That doesn’t mean that Fisher will forever treat NIL as a taboo subject. But for the type of market that could be in play for Fisher, I can’t imagine him signing up for a situation in which he can’t offer top dollar, and even if he can, he’ll be in a position to have his roster get poached by bigger schools.
Dan Mullen could be taking on some of that at UNLV after he spent 3 years away from coaching in media. Mullen had a perfectly nice life away from coaching with offseason trips to Europe and weekday cruises on Lake Oconee. He sat on that $12 million buyout he got after he was fired by Florida, which was roughly 16% of the buyout that Fisher received. Instead of taking a coordinator job — something that would’ve felt inevitable given Mullen’s prowess as an offensive schemer — he waited because he wanted to run a program again. Time will tell how it works for Mullen at UNLV, but in the NIL era, Barry Odom showed why it could be one of the more coveted Group of 5 jobs.
It’s certainly possible that Fisher eventually finds a home like that after the 2025 or 2026 season. But once upon a time, Fisher left FSU because he believed that the program was falling behind with its facilities and spending. He sought a place like A&M that would never have to worry about that potentially getting in the way of competing at a championship level.
Fisher isn’t in a position to pick and choose from a long list of suitors like he was during the 2010s. I’d love to know the situations in which Fisher would have a mutual interest.
I already expressed why any Group of 5 job would be tough to imagine Fisher being interested in, unless programs like Memphis, Tulane or USF needed replacements and an administrative connection worked in his favor. Even that seems extremely unlikely given the type of up-and-coming coach that those programs have typically pursued. After Fisher didn’t fill the West Virginia vacancy, could a program like Cincinnati or Baylor have an interest in Fisher? That wouldn’t feel imminent, either. Then again, after the aforementioned Rodriguez and Scott Frost got Big 12 jobs, we shouldn’t completely rule that out.
There’s only 1 potential SEC job that I wouldn’t dismiss with 99.9% certainty. Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek made the bold move to hire college basketball’s version of Fisher, John Calipari. If that job came open, could Yurachek follow a similar approach with Fisher? It’s not impossible.
Still, though. Do any of these outcomes feel like they’re most likely for Fisher? Not at this point.
If he had that itch and he took on an “it’s not about the money” role, it would’ve happened after a year away from the sidelines. In reality, no job that Fisher takes will be about the money. He earned generational wealth that’ll be there whether he watches another football game again or not, much less coach in one.
Fisher’s future could be rather uneventful. At least publicly. Lord knows that having tens of millions of dollars and fishing the days away on one of your several properties isn’t a bad kind of “uneventful.”
Perhaps the day will come when Fisher gets back to the sidelines. But nobody has ever had that many reasons not to get back in the game.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
