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O’Gara: Jimbo Fisher is proof that any hire can fail, but it’s still improbable that this one did

Connor O'Gara

By Connor O'Gara

Published:


My jaw hit the floor.

It was a Friday morning on the first of December. I remember having to postpone a scheduled call with my dad in home hospice care because Texas A&M made the splash of all splashes. The Aggies did what few on the outside thought was possible — they hired Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher.

“Money talks,” was the takeaway after Fisher’s contract terms of 10 years, $75 million were reported. That deal was fully guaranteed. You weren’t supposed to poach a national championship-winning coach, but if you did, well, we all found out that day that’s what it would look like.

Nearly 6 years later on a Sunday morning, my jaw again hit the floor.

Billy Liucci of TexAgs reported that Fisher was expected to be fired at A&M. Never mind the fact that a nearly $77 million buyout was remaining on his deal, or the fact that with a third-string quarterback, A&M just had its best offensive SEC performance in 5 years to clinch bowl eligibility. Brett McMurphy confirmed that the Aggies were pulling the plug on the Fisher era.

Mind you, the richest buyout ever paid to a head coach was Gus Malzahn’s $21.5 million after Auburn fired him at the end of the 2020 season. Malzahn at least spent 8 roller-coaster seasons on The Plains, and he led Auburn to a pair of SEC West titles.

A&M, meanwhile, never won the West with Fisher. As the new era of the SEC begins in 2024 with Texas and Oklahoma, the Aggies are still searching for their first conference championship game appearance of the 21st century.

Oh, and this “future championship plaque” can officially join Fisher’s tossed Tallahassee Christmas trees in the dumpster.

Better yet, somebody needs to save that sucker and let it serve as a reminder. Money doesn’t buy everything.

Paying that buyout won’t guarantee that A&M will successfully move on, and even in the likely event that Fisher’s successor is splashy, let’s not forget the task at hand. Money owed isn’t just related to Fisher and his staff’s buyouts or just the new staff. You’ve got a roster with 52 blue-chip recruits (10 5-stars, 42 4-stars) who can all transfer without penalty during a 30-day window after Fisher’s firing is official. A&M will either have to pony up to keep those players, or it’ll have to make a significant commitment to replace them.

Welcome to the high price of big-time college football in the 2020s.

It seems like just yesterday that Fisher was defending his program and the “Sliced Bread” rumor that there was a $30 million NIL find that was paid to sign his historic 2022 recruiting class. Fisher clapped back at Lane Kiffin and Nick Saban, both of whom suggested that the Aggies had “bought” that unprecedented amount of talent.

No matter how that talent was acquired, it was clear. That was going to define Fisher’s tenure in College Station.

Maximize it, and he’d get another one of those gaudy extensions, and the word “buyout” would be pushed to the back burner. Waste it, and he’d get the gaudiest buyout ever paid.

With a team that ranked No. 4 in the 247sports talent composite each of the past 2 seasons, Fisher went 11-11 without a single road win.  He ended his A&M tenure having lost 9 consecutive road games. To say that Fisher never got the most out of that talent would be an understatement.

Did he have bad injury luck? Sure. You’re not supposed to have 3 different starting quarterbacks in consecutive seasons. You’re also not supposed to have a disappointing offensive line for the third consecutive season.

Three years ago when Fisher got his extension, nobody’s jaw dropped. In 2020, Fisher led the program to a No. 4 finish in the final AP Poll, which was the program’s best since 1939. He was supposed to be beyond the Kevin Sumlin side-by-sides, which was why the raise and extension to a 10-year, $95 million contract wasn’t met with great resistance. It squashed any notion that former A&M athletic director Scott Woodward, who left for LSU before the 2019 season, would poach Fisher with another blank-check contract.

Instead, Fisher lived up to that extension with a 3-year stretch in which he went 19-15 overall and 10-13 in SEC play. The Aggies didn’t finish ranked in the AP Poll.

I’d love to go back and tell everyone (myself included) in December 2017 that the Fisher tenure would end with just 2 AP Top 25 finishes. I’d have plenty of questions.

“Did he stop recruiting?”

Nope. Fisher signed 14 5-star recruits and his full-cycle classes never finished outside of the top 10.

“Did he have a scandal?”

Nope. The closest thing Fisher had to a scandal was calling Saban a “narcissist” and going scorched earth on the G.O.A.T.

“Well, did he just forget how to coach?”

I don’t have an answer to that. We can safely say that Fisher waited too long to hire an offensive play-caller, and even though his polarizing hire of Bobby Petrino has improved the A&M offense by 12 points per game, it’s clear that the hay was already in the barn.

Going 8-4 was a best-case scenario in Year 6. That’s not what A&M signed up for. It signed up for seasons like 2020 to become the norm. It signed up for Fisher to have his A&M version of Jameis Winston, yet the Aggies never produced a top-30 passing offense in those 6 seasons. It signed up for actual trophies and not fake championship plaques that aged like an avocado.

On the surface, any championship-hopeful program would sign on the dotted line to poach a coach with a ring who could bring in elite talent. They just wouldn’t have signed on the dotted line of a blank check like A&M did. Twice.

Well, I suppose that buyout makes it No. 3.

Connor O'Gara

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.

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