I don’t know who still needs to hear this, but what the heck? I’ll just say it again now that Texas A&M has unofficially been eliminated from the SEC West race.

Jimbo Fisher isn’t getting fired, and I’ve got 76.8 million reasons why he isn’t getting fired.

I realize that’s the only way that some want to discuss Fisher’s future in the midst of yet another disappointing season in College Station wherein division title hopes didn’t make it to November. But we need a bit of nuance because of the circumstances surrounding Fisher’s future.

Like, the $76.8 million elephant in the room.

That wasn’t an Alabama joke. Really. I promise I’m not smart enough to slip in comments like that, though it is worth mentioning that since the Fisher-Nick Saban war of words that captivated the internet in May 2022, A&M is 9-10 overall and 4-8 against SEC competition.

But yes, the buyout is the reason that Fisher will have a job in College Station beyond 2023. If his buyout was $7.68 million instead of $76.8 million, he’d be a dead man walking.

Instead, Fisher is a man who would walk away with generational wealth if he were fired at any point in his current contract (that’s guaranteed money owed at the end of the contract):

  • 2023 — $76,800,000
  • 2024 — $67,550,000
  • 2025 — $58,200,000
  • 2026 — $48,750,000
  • 2027 — $39,200,000
  • 2028 — $29,550,000
  • 2029 — 19,800,000
  • 2030 — $9,950,000
  • 2031 — Nothing

To recap, paying Fisher less than $50 million cannot happen until after the 2026 season. That’s still more than twice as much as the $21.5 million that Gus Malzahn got, which is the richest buyout ever given to a college football head coach.

Again, many of you already know this. But this notion that A&M will just fork over $76.8 million for Fisher not to work continues to be insanity. “But the boosters” isn’t a good enough argument, either. That move would easily be a 9-figure decision because of the money paid to buy out Fisher’s staff, as well as what it would take to hire his replacement. Even a coach from the Sun Belt like Billy Napier got a $51.8 million contract at Florida, which didn’t account for the millions of dollars spent on the well-documented expanded support staff. And unlike Fisher, Napier replaced a coach with just a $12 million buyout.

The Aggies are in college football hell, that is.

This is what it looks like to be a fan in college football hell with seemingly no obvious way out of it:

A&M has 1 of the 5 active coaches with a national championship ring, and in Year 6, it’s never been more obvious that he’s not going to be the person to get them there. Jackie Sherrill is the only coach in the conference’s history who reached his first SEC Championship post-Year 6. Instead of being in a division title race, A&M is in a race to end an 8-game road losing streak. It didn’t even matter that Fisher actually made a smart move by bringing Bobby Petrino in to run his offense (that’s had mixed results, but I still stand by that decision).

However long Fisher is in College Station, he is going to continue to get in his own way, and he’ll come up short of maximizing the talent he brings through those doors.

Sound harsh? For all the great things Fisher has done in his career, why is it that he hasn’t had an all-conference quarterback or a top-30 passing offense since Jameis Winston? Yes, injuries have been costly in recent memory, but this isn’t what the Fisher experience was supposed to be. A&M was supposed to have a New Year’s Bowl floor and a national championship ceiling. Instead, A&M has had a miss-a-bowl-game floor and a New Year’s 6 bowl ceiling … which it hit once in the COVID season.

If you somehow took the money out of the equation, Fisher would actually be just considered more of the same — or even a slight upgrade — at A&M in the 21st century. Look beyond the Kevin Sumlin side-by-side and instead look at the 18 pre-Fisher seasons in College Station compared to what he’s done in 5.5 seasons on the job:

Texas A&M
2000-17 (pre-Fisher)
2018-present (Fisher)
Overall win %
0.575
0.642
Conference win %
0.490
0.560
Win % vs. AP Top 25
0.293
0.417
Conf. title game appearances
0
0

The point of that isn’t to show that Fisher is getting a bad wrap and he deserves to be given a pass after his extension that was worth $95 million over the following 10 seasons. I won’t argue that. I will argue that the notion that anything is better than Fisher is misguided. Fisher is the Aggies’ 5th head coach of the 21st century. That’s also as many AP Top 25 finishes as the Aggies have had in the new millennium.

Reality is that any world in which Fisher gets paid a record-setting buyout to walk away would be the byproduct of unbearable booster embarrassment, which isn’t as simple as struggling to hit 8-4 while Texas wins the Big 12 before entering the SEC. It would be embarrassment that the Aggies swung for the fences and did a bat flip after poaching Fisher from Florida State … only to hit a routine fly ball to center field.

Moving on from Fisher on the heels of an 8-4 regular season would be ironic, considering A&M has only surpassed 8 wins in the regular season 4 times in 23 seasons this century. And also, the irony is that it would be a 3-win improvement from last year’s disaster.

The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman reported after the Tennessee loss that A&M boosters “will find the money to get rid of him if (Fisher) can’t get this thing going.”

I’m not sitting here saying that Feldman’s reporting is misguided. I do believe those conversations are being had. Texas A&M certainly has charitable boosters. But let’s not pretend that paying someone $76.8 million not to work — there’s also no offset language in that fully guaranteed contract — is money that can be “found.” It’s entirely different than committing that money to a coach over the course of a decade. Shoot, half the SEC now has coaches making at least $9 million annually. Inevitably, A&M’s successor to Fisher would also be part of that club. And suddenly, you’re talking about a university being twice as invested as any other school in the conference.

(I realize that it’s not money coming from the same place, but one of these days, we’re going to do an in-depth breakdown of A&M being No. 5 among American universities with $279 million in outstanding debt, per Sportico.)

That’s the problem with all of this. To fire Fisher — as underwhelming as he’s been — is to double down and say that spending even more will get A&M to the places it feels like it should go. The only way out is for the Aggies to dig their heels in even deeper and hope that someone with a worse track record than pre-A&M Fisher can turn things around.

What should give anyone confidence that someone will step in and automatically get the Aggies out of being a national punching bag? They’re in that spot because of the money that was spent. If Fisher was making $6 million with a $15 million buyout, the A&M conversation would be completely different.

But that’s not reality. Reality is that Fisher’s team (super-agent Jimmy Sexton) turned a fully guaranteed $75 million contract — former A&M AD Scott Woodward infamously said he would’ve given him a blank check to come to College Station — into a raise for 2 reasons. In 2020, he led A&M to its best AP Poll finish (No. 4) since 1939. That extension also eliminated speculation that Fisher could eventually follow Woodward to LSU and replace Ed Orgeron after he entered 2021 firmly on the hot seat.

Under normal circumstances, an underachieving Year 6 coach’s seat should be on fire. Nothing about A&M’s circumstances with Fisher are normal, though. It would take an unprecedented commitment to move on from Fisher, and it would take an unprecedented run for Fisher to ever be worth that investment. I won’t hold my breath on either thing happening.

Instead, I’ll hold true to my not-so-hot take that Fisher and the Aggies aren’t going anywhere in 2023. Unless, of course, “anywhere” includes going deeper into the depths of college football hell.